I remember my first English class in Form 1D (1976) was an oral lesson. It was a Monday morning. Fr. Taylor brought with him a recorder to the class. It was not an ordinary cassette recorder we used at home. It was one with wide tapes and two big wheels exposed, very professional look. I was amazed. The book as well as the recording, were done by Fr Taylor himself.  We had to follow the recording and read aloud, sentence by sentence. We had also to learn by heart, the content of the lesson he taught. And that would be examined the next week. As a result, my oral English had improved quite significantly by the end of the school year.

I had the privilege of having Fr. Farren teach me English in Forms 3D, 6S and 7S. One  of the biggest fear of attending his class was that he commanded "pencils and paper please" at the beginning of the class and conducted a short test. I failed most of the time as I never did any revision of what he taught!

In 5A, I was taught by the late Mr. Francis Kong. His teaching style, I would say was rather unique. He did not use text book much, except the little one which he had written to teach grammer and comprehension. In the class, he just talked and taught whatever he thought of, using hints from his book or elsewhere. And through the hints, he would elaborate the use of the words and related phrases in detail. As time went by, we were gradually able to "merge" everything he taught into a full picture. He used Chinese a lot to explain as well.  As a result, I got a distinction in the HKCEE. Actually, 17 classmates got distinctions out of 41 in the class and the rest got credits except one.

Over the 7 years in Wah Yan, I also had Fr. Finnaren teaching me Reading, Fr. Moran teaching Bible Kwonledge, Fr. Naylor, Fr Zee and Fr Deignan teaching Ethics. Altogether, 6 Jesuits had taught me. I would say I am a lucky one. I heard a complaint from a graduate a few years ago that he had never been taught by a Jesuit during his years in Wah Yan. I understand now that the Jesuits do not teach at school.

I am doing some private tutoring as a part time job. I find that there are a couple of problems which retard the students to learning good English nowadays. Most of my students seldom read books, or read none at all. And we all know this is fatal. They are also too lazy to look up in a dictionary to learn new words. Instead they will search online to look for their meaning. That deprives their opportunities of learning good English from good dictionaries like Oxford or Longman, which will give the meaning and usage of the new words and the related ones. More harmfully, they are too examination oriented. They like to do supplementary exercise in order to have quick results. This does not help in learning good English.
 
I agree with Yu Fong-ying (1961) that learning English is a long journey. I am learning at least one new word or phrase every day. “In the school of languages, there are no graduates.”  I am still wandering.

P.S. Our class was used to call Fr Farren as Fr "Fer-ren" for many years. It was wrong. It should be pronounced as Far-ren ("Far" as if we pronounce Far East). But Fr never corrected our mistake. It was not until 4 years ago, when I visited him in Galway, Ireland, that I discovered that. Everyone called him "Far-ren" there.