Blackburn English Language School

The fifth school observation was placed at Blackburn English Language School (BELS). BELS is a government school providing primary and secondary school education for students who are new arrivals to the country. Students in BELS are all from language backgrounds other than English, so they will have to attend a 20-week intensive English Language programme provided by the school to help them enroll in mainstream school. The school aims to prepare students in terms of their language ability to enter the mainstream schools after 20 weeks, and in terms of their readiness to blend into the Australian society.

BELS is providing education to 180 secondary school students and 160 primary school students from 26 countries at the moment. In primary, students are streamed according to their age, so P1 will the youngest ones and P8 will be the oldest ones. In secondary, the streaming of students will be based on students’ age and ability. The name of a class is made up of a number (1-7) and a letter (A or B). For the number, it suggests the English levels of students, 1 being the weakest one and 7 being the strongest; while for the letter, A stands for junior secondary and B stands for senior secondary.

I was assigned to observe a P1 class and a 4B class. The P1 class was an English class, the topic of the lesson was ordinal numbers. The teacher made use of authentic materials and even students’ own work as teaching materials. She pronounced every word clearly and repeated certain sound when necessary. In order to get the students to practise the target language, she often said ‘I say you say, the car is coming…’, and students followed her to practise. The teacher also used positive reinforcement to encourage children to speak in English. The overall learning atmosphere was good and small children were communicating in English. The other lesson I observed was a 4B Math class. The teacher was absent and a non-Math teacher was assigned to teach the students statistics. The teacher read the instructions directly from the book, and students were confused and bored. They did not understand what they had to do and how to complete the task. Almost every student is Chinese except for one African, they created a big Chinese social circle in the class and all of them were communicating in Chinese. However, the teacher did not use any mean to stop them from speaking Chinese and students in the class did not actually use or practise English.

To a certain extent, the 4B class is quite similar to a normal English class in Hong Kong schools. Students in both schools are speaking English as their second language, and the majority of students are of the same nationality. Thus, they do not really have to speak English in class because they do not have the need to, they can just communicate freely in their mother tongues. A suggestion to the problem of class 4B will be to mix up different nationalities within a class, so as to create a need for students to speak in English to communicate and socialize instead of using their own mother tongues.