Melbourne Grammar’s Senior School

Our second school visit is placed at Melbourne Grammar’s Senior School. Students from Melbourne Grammar’s Senior School (MGSS) are ranging from Years 9 to 12, about 70% of them are Europeans and the rest of them are locals. MGSS is an elite school which provides quality and challenging educational programme to students. The motto of the school is to nurture youngsters to work and pray to achieve a sense of fulfillment, and it aims at cultivating students to be an all-rounded person with leadership skills that contribute to society in the future.

I went to two classes today, one Latin class and the other French. It is really nice of the school to provide students with a large variety of language electives that they can choose from! 15 students in the Latin class are in Year 9, and perhaps they are comparatively junior, they are not very familiar with the language. They are doing a pre-test today, and the lesson is mostly dominated by the teacher. It is the teacher who is speaking when they are doing the test or doing the checking afterwards. When the teacher is checking answers with the boys, he tells students or writes the answers on the board directly. Students get little chance to speak Latin, and they communicate in English. There is little interaction between teacher and students, and between students.

The second class I observed is a French class. The 13 students in this class are in Year 11, a more senior class. Students are showing higher mastery of the language than the previous class. The teacher would code-switch between English and French. She would give instructions twice, once in French and once in English. After the listening task, teacher checks the answers in French with the boys, and they can answer her in fluent French. There are more student-teacher and student-student interaction in this class, and teacher would try to guide the students to the correct answers by asking display questions, instead of giving out the answers directly.

In terms of style of teaching, both teachers are using traditional approach to teach. Students are learning a second or foreign language through drillings and tests. This is similar to Hong Kong, students would not have a chance to really speak the language. They would be spoon-fed the different information, and would not practice the newly acquired knowledge. Students get bored very easily and cannot concentrate on teachers’ teaching for long. A suggestion to that would be to learn in a more communicative approach. Students would be more engaged and involved in class once they understand their roles are not just passive listener in class. Activities and games would allow students to practice the target language and really absorb the knowledge.

Springvale English Language Centre

The first school we paid visit to is Springvale English Language Centre (SELC). Students in SELC have very diverse nationalities, they are mainly refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, Sudan, Burma and China. It aims at enhancing students’ literacy and numeracy through communicative learning approach and learning experience approach.

From the diverse cultural backgrounds we can foresee the most probable problems encountered in English Language teaching would be how to teach small children who have varied standards of literacy proper English and stop them from speaking in their first languages. In order to cater for the different needs of students, the school has streamed the students according to their levels of English instead of age which is the approach Hong Kong adopting. The class I went to would be 10 children ranging around Grades 1-3, comprises of six nationalities, and their levels of English are vary quite a bit. The teacher focuses on vocabularies and pronunciation, and put little emphasis on grammar items. She starts by drilling the class the vocabularies of dates. She makes use of the word cards she prepares, pronounces very clearly the words and the students follow her. She then moves on to the letter of the week – F.

She is teaching the students the ff sound and vocabularies begin with F. She points at the pictures of items begin with F, and asks the students to tell her the words. Very often, she repeats the consonant sounds so as to make them very clear to the students. After reading a big book, she ends the lesson by grouping the students into small groups. The groups are grouped according to students’ levels of English and they are assigned different tasks – completing reading worksheets, playing alphabet games and using computers to listen to and read stories. The homework given to students are as well vary with regard to their levels. For example, the more capable students would be making sentences with given words, while the less capable ones would be asked to do copying of sentences only.

The approach SELC adopts is good in a sense that it caters for different needs of students, and makes learning English more effective and efficient. However, this way of teaching would not be very feasible in Hong Kong. The class size of Hong Kong is big, and students are streamed with regard to their age. The number of teachers and their levels of English would also hinder us from doing so. And that the education system of Hong Kong is exam-oriented, it would not be of students’ benefit if schools are putting the emphasis mostly on pronunciation. Schools tend to teach grammar in early primary schools explicitly, which is a contrast to SELC, and students are made to do the same kind of homework irrespective of their standards. It may be good in terms of not categorizing or labeling students’ ability, but may be further dragging the less capable students behind.

First impressions on Melbourne and Australia :)

When we were still on the plane, we were showed a video about the declaration of items from the Immigration Department of Australia, and I was a little bit shocked that Australia was quite a strict country in that aspect! I had to declare the food in my luggage even though they were only snacks!
But then the people are nice and yeah, I like the weather! :) It is a little bit different from my expectation, and it is warmer than I imagined. :)

Sitting on the car that drove us to the host families, I looked outside carefully and could hardly recognize the streets in the neighbourhood, they all looked the same to me. I had sort of googled where I would be living when I was in Hong Kong, haha, and it turned out to be much better than what I had expected. :)

My host mother is really nice, she is named Josephine. She brought me to the convenient store right away when I arrived and I did a little shopping for my daily necessities.

I enjoy my time in Melbourne up til now (even though the internet connection is not quite accessible and is indeed very expensive :p), and hope i can have time to explore more about Melbourne in the coming two months!