If you grew up in Hong Kong, you can probably still feel it. The Thursday-night ritual. The word list photocopied from the textbook. A parent or grandparent reading the characters out one by one while you wrote, erased, wrote again. Friday’s 默書, marked in red. For a generation of families, dictation was not a part of school — it was the part you did at home, every single week.
That ritual is now, quietly, being taken apart. And if you have a child in a Hong Kong primary school right now, it is worth understanding what is actually happening — because it changes what dictation night is for.
What’s actually changing
This is not a rumour or a one-off experiment. It is coming from the top and from the ground at the same time.
In 2024, the Education Bureau updated its Primary Education Curriculum Guide, recommending that schools cut back the volume of dictation and review how often they test. The follow-up Primary English Language Curriculum Guide went further and put numbers on it — for the first time asking schools to regularly review and simplify how frequent and how heavy English dictation and tests are, capping dictation at no more than 10% of the English grade, and telling schools to avoid paper assessments for Primary 1 students in their first months so they can settle in without pressure.
Then, in the 2025 school year, some schools stopped waiting for gradual change. Lok Sin Tong Leung Kwok Po School (Branch) made the news by scrapping both Chinese and English dictation across the whole school. In their place: word games, phonics wheels, BINGO and word searches, electronic platforms like Kahoot and Quizlet, even AI-generated songs built around the week’s vocabulary. Other schools are trimming rather than cutting — fewer dictations, lighter word lists, more room to breathe.
The principals’ reasoning is strikingly consistent, and it is the part worth quoting. One put it plainly: students were spending so much time cramming for dictation that they had no time left to read. Even the strongest scorers, another noted, would still 執筆忘字 — freeze mid-word when it counted — because the words had been memorised for Friday, not learned for life.
Why this is happening (and it’s not new)
It is tempting to read this as schools “going soft.” It isn’t. Hong Kong has been walking this direction for twenty-five years.
Back in 2000, the Education Commission’s landmark reform Learning for Life, Learning through Life already argued for less mechanical drilling and more “assessment for learning.” When Hong Kong later eased off the relentless kill-and-drill culture in its primary years, the international scores didn’t collapse — they jumped. Hong Kong ranked second in the world on the PIRLS reading study in 2006, up from fourteenth in 2001.
The lesson the system drew from that is the lesson driving today’s changes: the goal was never to write words from memory once a week. The goal was to raise children who read. And a child who spends three evenings a week grinding a word list is a child who is not reading a book.
That is the real tension the reform is trying to fix. Not “dictation is bad,” but “dictation, done the old heavy way, quietly eats the very thing school actually wants — reading time, and a child who still likes doing it.”
So is dictation over? Not exactly
Here is where a lot of parents get understandably confused, so let’s be clear about it.
Dictation is not being declared useless. Being able to hear a word and write it correctly is still a real, useful skill. What is being retired is the volume and the fear around it — dictation as a weekly high-stakes performance that swallows entire evenings and turns the kitchen table into a testing centre.
Most schools are not cancelling dictation outright. They are shrinking it, softening the stakes, and moving the emphasis toward reading widely and learning words in context rather than in isolation. Even the schools that dropped it kept the underlying goal — recognising and using words — and just changed the method.
Which lands the question squarely back where it always really lived: at home. If school is no longer going to run the weekly drill for you, what should the ten or fifteen minutes you do spend on words actually look like?
What this means for practice at your kitchen table
The old model asked parents to be two things at once: the human tape recorder reading words aloud, and the invigilator watching to make sure it got done. It was exhausting, it was often tense, and — as Hong Kong’s own schools have now decided — it was pointed at the wrong target.
The new model is really an invitation to do less of the wrong work and protect more of the right work. A few things that line up with where the schools are heading:
- Make word practice short and self-run, so it doesn’t eat reading time. The whole reason schools are cutting dictation is to free evenings for books. So when your child does practise words, the win is to get it done efficiently and hand it back — a child tapping through their own list in ten minutes, then going to read, is exactly the shape the reform is chasing.
- Practise words the way children actually learn them — by sound, in pieces. Freezing on a word is almost never laziness; it’s trying to hold nine loose letters as one lump. Hearing “beau-ti-ful” as three small sounds is what makes it stick. That’s the same instinct behind the phonics wheels and games the schools brought in.
- Lower the stakes at home, not just at school. If the classroom has stopped treating Friday as a verdict, the kitchen table can too. Practice that a child runs themselves, at their own pace, without a parent gritting their teeth over their shoulder, is practice they’ll actually come back to.
- Then close the app and open a book. This is the point of the whole reform. Words are the on-ramp; reading is the road. Fifteen minutes of light word practice that buys back twenty minutes of reading is a trade Hong Kong’s schools are now making on purpose.
Where a tool like LoroBuddy fits
We built LoroBuddy for exactly the household this change creates — one where dictation still happens, but it should be quick, calm, and run by the child, not a weekly ordeal run by a tired parent.
You snap a photo of the word list, and your child takes it from there: the app reads each word clearly (in English, Cantonese, Mandarin and more, so one tool covers a trilingual week), sounds tricky words out syllable by syllable when they get stuck, highlights each word as it reads so eye and ear move together, and lets them check their own work. It is kid-first and one-handed by design — simple enough that a young child drives it alone while you start dinner. No ads pulling at their attention, built to children’s privacy standards.
None of that is meant to bring back the weekly drill. It’s meant to make the small amount of word practice that remains as painless and fast as possible — so the evening’s real prize, a child curled up with a book, is still there when the practice is done.
The bottom line
Hong Kong is not abandoning learning. It is doing something braver: admitting that a ritual most of us grew up assuming was essential was, in its heaviest form, getting in the way of the thing it was supposed to serve.
For families, that’s genuinely good news. It means the pressure to run a weekly high-stakes drill at home is lifting — with the schools’ blessing. What’s left is the useful core: a little word practice, done kindly and quickly, in service of a child who reads. If you can hit that, you are already teaching your child exactly what Hong Kong’s classrooms are now trying to.
Curious how to make the small bit of practice that remains as painless as possible? Read why dictation turns into a fight — and how to stop it, and how to snap a photo your dictation app can actually read.