BEd Benchmark Speaking Test, Faculty of Education, HKU

FACULTY OF EDUCATION
THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
BEd INTERNAL BENCHMARK TEST 2005
SPEAKING
(5 minutes)
Task 1A

Reading Aloud (Prose)

Please read the following prose passage aloud as meaningfully as possible. Read it in such a way that
you would arouse your students interest.

Teacher, you got it all wrong

Oh, no, Teacher, you got it all wrong.
I just realised how we never learned to think in English and why we could not write in English without
the fear of making mistakes.
Hate: when you introduced the word hate to me in English, you were in such a hurry to show me that
it was a verb, a transitive verb but it could also be intransitive and the past tense looked like hated
and the past participle was also such and such and you moved on to write on the board the tricky
hatred noun of hate not to be confused with hated and then the adjective of hate. And You
yourself never did tell us one thing you hated in your life. Not one thing. There was no time.
It was when I read Seymour Papert, a renowned scholar at MIT, through the Internet, writing how he
grew up in South Africa
I grew up in South Africa and one thing I learned to hate was all forms of segregation
He went on and on, saying what and why he hated
It was then that I relearned the word hate and I picked up the word segregation so surely without
looking it up in a dictionary. No need to.
Christina Chang
Source: Christina Chang, Teacher, you got it all wrong. http://nnest.mousse.net/articles/chang.html.
April 2005

BEd Benchmark Speaking Test, Faculty of Education, HKU

Task 1B

Reading Aloud (Poetry)

Please read the following poem aloud as meaningfully as possible. Read it in such a way that you
would arouse your students interest.
English is a Pain (Pane?)
By Bruce Lansky
Rain, reign, rein,
English is a pain.
Although the words
sound just alike,
the spellings not the same!
Bee, b, B,
Id rather climb a tree,
than learn to spell
the same old word,
not just one way , but three!
Sight, site, cite,
I try with all my might.
No matter which
I finally choose,
its not the one thats right!
There, their, theyre,
enough to make you swear.
Too many ways
to write one sound,
I just dont think its fair!
To, two, too,
so whats a kid to do?
I think Ill go
to live on Mars,
and leave this mess with ewe! (you?)
Source: B. Lansky, A Bad Case of the Giggles: Kids Favourite Funny Poems

Task 1C

Telling a Story/Recounting an Experience/Presenting Arguments

April 2005

BEd Benchmark Speaking Test, Faculty of Education, HKU

Talk about one of the most successful grammar / pronunciation lessons you have ever had / taught.
Why was it successful?

April 2005