ABSTRACT
How to make English as a foreign language (EFL) interesting and relevant to students? How to engage students in English lessons? If students have come from a background where English does not serve any everyday communicative purposes, English lessons easily tend to focus on textbook drills for tests and exams. How to help teachers move away from textbook exercises only? In this chapter, we shall first outline the context of English learning for different social groups in Hong Kong and then discuss some concepts related to popular culture and the strategies commonly used to incorporate popular culture into literacy education. Then we shall share our experience from a three-year school-based curriculum development project. In this project, we worked with teachers in a school in a low socioeconomic status (SES) area in Hong Kong to design an English language arts (ELA) enrichment curriculum for junior secondary students that capitalizes on popular cultural resources. Apart from discussing the strategies we used to incorporate pop cultural genres and themes to engage students in English learning, a non-intrusive, supportive model of teacher–researcher collaboration for bringing popular culture into the local school curriculum is also discussed.
