Presenting Social Issues in Writing Teacher’s Notes
3. Hong Kong population trends
facing the same problem
As expected, Hong Kong is also hitting rough weather. In the past fifteen years, male life expectancy has risen from 72.3 to 78.8, while female life expectancy has gone up from 78.4 to 84.4. What is worse, These numbers are forecast to increase even further respectively to 82.5 and 88.0 in 2033. The number of children married couples give birth to has declined from 3 in the 1970s to a pathetic 0.97 in 2005.
Catering for Learner Diversity
For more advanced students:
You might like to just provide students with the first example and remove the underlines in the rest of the text to give students more challenge.
Learning Activity 3 40 minutes (group work)
Teachers cut up the paragraphs in the letter to the editor below and distribute the strips to students. Students sequence the paragraphs and label the different parts. Teachers should remember not to distribute the handout for Learning Activity 4 at this stage as it will give away the answers for this activity.
(C) Dear Editor,
(B) I am writing in response to the article ‘Family Plight’ dated 18 April and would like to express my views on the recent tide of domestic violence cases.
(G) I strongly believe that no single solution will eliminate the multi-dimensional issue of domestic violence. Instead, a combination of various preventive and remedial measures, taken by different government bodies and community organisations at different stages, is needed. Here in this letter, I would like to point out the importance of two measures in particular.
(A) First, I would like to address the need to increase law enforcement. Domestic violence is a crime, and naturally, there should be severe punishment as a deterrent. However, as far as I am concerned, the problem now lies more in the lack of identification and arrest than in the lack of legal consequences. The police are often the first people domestic violence victims seek help from. Police officers should not treat these cases as only disputes within family, but they should understand that family violence can lead to a devastating impact on the individual victims, the family and the community. Instead of dealing with family battering cases in isolation, frontline officers should also be more sensitive to the possibility of long term abuses. They should be given training on detecting and handling family issues and a specialised division or team can also be set up to follow up any such cases.
(F) My second suggestion is to encourage the reporting of violence. Although the number of reported cases of domestic violence is on the increase, I believe there are still countless victims who remain silent for fear of losing their financial income, shelter and children. To encourage domestic violence victims to report their situation to the police, they should be made aware of the support and protection they will receive. Social workers and community organisations like family service centres will play an important role in this regard. Also, a strong message should be sent to the public that if they suspect their family or neighbours are victims of domestic violence, they should immediately report their concerns to the police with the guarantee that their identity will be protected.
(E) Domestic violence is morally wrong and causes enduring emotional pain. I must say to eliminate this social ill is a responsibility we, as a society, should not turn a blind eye to.
Suggested answers:
(C) Dear Editor,
(B) I am writing in response to the article ‘Family Plight’ dated 18 April and would like to express my views on the recent tide of domestic violence cases.
(G) I strongly believe that no single solution will eliminate the multi-dimensional issue of domestic violence. Instead, a combination of various preventive and remedial measures, taken by different government bodies and community organisations at different stages, is needed. Here in this letter, I would like to point out the importance of two measures in particular.
(A) First, I would like to address the need to increase law enforcement.
Domestic violence is a crime, and naturally, there should be severe punishment as a deterrent. However, as far as I am concerned, the problem now lies more in the lack of identification and arrest than in the lack of legal consequences. The police are often the first people domestic violence victims seek help from. Police officers should not treat these cases as only disputes within family, but they should understand that family violence can lead to a devastating impact on the individual victims, the family and the community. Instead of dealing with family battering cases in isolation, frontline officers should also be more sensitive to the possibility of long term abuses. They should be given training on detecting and handling family issues and a specialised division or team can also be set up to follow up any such cases.
(F) My second suggestion is to encourage the reporting of violence.
Although the number of reported cases of domestic violence is on the increase, I believe there are still countless victims who remain silent for fear of losing their financial income, shelter and children. To encourage domestic violence victims to report their situation to the police, they should be made aware of the support and protection they will receive.
Social workers and community organisations like family service centres will play an important role in this regard. Also, a strong message should be sent to the public that if they suspect their family or neighbours are victims of domestic violence, they should immediately report their concerns to the police with the guarantee that their identity will be protected.
(E) Domestic violence is morally wrong and causes enduring emotional pain. I must say to eliminate this social ill is a responsibility we, as a society, should not turn a blind eye to.
(D) Yours faithfully, Chris Wong
2. Greeting 5. Reference to the article you are responding to
6. Your point of view
1. Body Paragraph 1
1. Body Paragraph 2
3. Call for action
4. Your name
Learning Activity 4 40 minutes (pair work)
This learning activity aims to further raise students’ awareness of the features of letters to the editor.
Suggested answers:
1. Do you need to put the name of the editor in the letter? Why? Or why not?
No. Even if you know the name of the editor, it is not appropriate to put it in the letter.
Letters to the editor are not correspondence between only the writer and the newspaper editor. The target audience actually include all the readers of the newspaper.
2. When are personal pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘we’ used?
‘I’ is used when the writer wants to make it clear that the point made is his / her opinion.
‘We’ is used to refer to the community in general.
3. What phrases are useful for expressing opinions? Underline them.
See answers in the letter on page T84.
4. How is a letter to the editor similar to and different from an argumentative essay?
(Accept any reasonable comparison)
• Both text-types are used to express opinions and present arguments with a purpose to convince the reader.
• Because of spacing limits, a letter to the editor is usually shorter and more direct.
Argumentative essays tend to include more details, examples and elaboration to support the arguments.
• A letter to the editor is often a response to an article, an editorial, another writer’s letter to the editor, about which the readers are presumed to already know.
Therefore, when compared with an argumentative essay, less background information is needed in a letter to the editor.
Teachers can decide what text-types they want their students to produce as a final display of their research project results. As mentioned at the beginning of this unit, students do not need to write fact sheets or letters to the editor, if teachers think other forms of writing, e.g.
feature articles, proposals, speeches and editorials, are more appropriate.
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