From a single lesson to a series of lessons: The contribution of learning study to re-design the pedagogy of teaching the whole unit on the topic of subject-verb agreement

Object of learning Some Cantonese speakers have great difficulties with learning the concept of “Subject-verb agreement” as there are no functional equivalents of the English Subject-verb agreement in both spoken Cantonese and written Chinese. This grammatical feature is one of the common learning difficulties among Hong Kong Primary school students. This paper illustrates how a group of P.5 primary English teachers, starting from identifying the object of learning of a single research lesson in an institute-school collaborative learning study, then extended to redesign the pedagogies of teaching the whole unit of “Subject-verb agreement”, finally not just helping students to understand the concept better, but also enhancing their reading and writing abilities. By making use of the platform of Learning study, at the end, a whole series of lessons on teaching “subject-verb agreement” had been developed which led to significant improvements on the students’ learning outcomes in all teaching cycles.