Glen Eira English Language Centre

The sixth school we paid visit to is Glen Eira English Language Centre. Glen Eira Language Centre (GELC) is a government funded school, it is one of the schools which participates in the New Arrivals Programme. It provides education for immigrants, refugees and international students, and help them transfer into mainstream secondary schools. It also receives students from mainstream schools to provide remedial English lessons to them. The majority of students in GELC are from Mainland China, and students are streamed according to their English levels and age.

I went to two different classes to observe the lessons. The first class I went to is 4C English class. It is a senior class and students are about 17 years old in Year 10. It was originally a class of 6 students, but 3 of them were sent to mainstream schools last week, so there were just 3 students in the class. The focus of the lesson was writing paragraphs, and the teacher adopted a traditional way of teaching. She used the same textbook throughout the lesson and no other authentic materials were used to assist her teaching. The text the teacher chosen and her instructions seemed to be too difficult for them. Hence, students seemed not to know very clearly what they had to do for most of the time and got bored. However, the teacher did not explain further nor did she encourage student to answer her questions. Instead, she got angry when students failed to provide the correct answer, and kept on discouraging students by stressing how easy the task was. The learning atmosphere seemed to be quite hostile and students were afraid of making mistakes.

The second class I went to was a level 2 Study of Society and Environment (SOSE) class. The age of students in this class ranges from 11 to 17 years old, and the majority of them are Chinese. The focus of lesson was vocabularies related to greenhouse effect. The teacher started the lesson by distributing an article to students, and wrote a list of vocabularies on the board. Students had to look up the meanings of the words on their dictionaries and explained to the teacher afterwards. Students spent almost the whole lesson on checking the meanings of words, and there was not much interaction between students and teacher, and among students. The teacher did not do anything to stop students from communicating in their mother tongue and students spoke Chinese when they were doing their task. In general students were actively participating in class and they were motivated to learn.

Overall the teaching style here is quite similar to Hong Kong’s, they are both traditional styles of teaching and do not really provide room to students to develop their creativity. One suggestion to the second class would be to allow students to come up to the vocabulary list on their own, and let them check the meanings before class at home. By doing so, it is hoped that students can be more independent of their learning, and they will know better about words they do not understand. It is also hoped that the lesson time can be better utilized to do something more constructive, and not to be wasted on tasks that students can accomplish without the presence of the teacher.