Faculty of English and Foreign Languages

English Language

It is the desire of the school that students apply English authentically in tasks via meaningful communication to produce a final product. The English language curriculum is a school-based language curriculum built on pedagogical approaches with the objective of making use of a broad range of activities and materials (including the integration of faith) that is applied through the generic skills, e.g. creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving, etc., to develop students’ God-given potential through various avenues and channels while given exposure to the different genres through the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking.

Aims and Objectives

1. To enrich the enjoyment of learning English as it is the language of global communication.
2. To apply English as a learning tool and as a medium to access knowledge around the world.
3. To integrate Christian Faith that attends to values and attitudes via learning English.
4. To enable students to appreciate English through various mediums, e.g. books, internet, newspapers, radio, television, films, interaction with foreigners, etc.
5. To expose students to the structure and skills required of the NSS curriculum.
6. To enhance the preparation of the NSS electives, i.e. short stories, social issues and debate.
7. To enable students to experience English coming alive through inquisitive learning and application.
8. To enhance alignment between curriculum and assessment towards promoting assessment for learning via school-based assessment and standards-reference reporting.

Curriculum

The Junior Secondary curriculum consists of two components, namely, English Language and English Literature Studies. Learning content and activities are arranged to enhance the students’ English proficiency by developing our students’ linguistic knowledge and skills in English language, and widening their exposure to the language.

On the one hand, the curriculum is designed to equip our students with a robust foundation in English reading, writing, speaking and listening; on the other hand, it also underscores the development of the generic skills in collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking. Besides, the whole curriculum places importance on providing the students with various experiences in coming into contact with English, so that the language can be appreciated as a tool for communication and not be reduced simply as an academic subject. It is our belief that this three-pronged approach would help our students to gain confident mastery of English for study, work, leisure and personal enrichment. Definitely, this would also get them well-prepared for the challenges in the NSS English curriculum.

Methodology

This section focuses on how the teaching content and approach; class arrangement and the other co-curricular activities help optimize English learning for the students.

Teaching of General English (reading & usage) is organized into different modules and units, which are theme-based. Different kinds of tasks are often employed in our lessons, which are aimed at creating a learning context, similar to the authentic situation, for the students to absorb the linguistic knowledge and make use of the language.

Concerning the grammar teaching, integrated tasks, in addition to the unit-based exercises, are included in the daily practice and examinations.

To further encourage the students to build up a reading habit, class readers are assigned to them with the reading guides given. Newspaper and magazines are often used as well for guided reading, class discussion or assignments. In fact, we attach great importance on extensive reading of theme-based articles.

Concerning writing, our school takes the process writing approach in which students are able to make changes on their first draft, after receiving the teacher’s feedback and their peer’s response. This provides the students with a chance to understand their weaknesses, seek improvement and gain higher autonomy in learning. They can hence attain stronger sense of satisfaction to see their progress. Moreover, they can train up their own communication and critical thinking skills when giving comment on their classmate’s work.

As for speaking, each class is split into two halves, taught by two different teachers. The small class teaching is to facilitate the interaction between the teacher and the students, and that between students. In the junior forms, besides learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, students would carry out various speaking tasks in the form of individual presentation, group discussion, drama or other performance.

In addition to these traditional core components of English teaching, our students gain wide exposure to the language through studying the English Literature Studies. They are guided to read and analyse different genres of texts, like poems, play scripts, short stories and so forth, and hence they can grasp a more comprehensive understanding of the language. On the other hand, the incorporation of language arts into the existing curriculum also helps broaden our students’ scope of English learning, by studying authentic texts like poems and short stories.

To take full advantage of information and communication technology in language learning, we implement “Bring Your Own Device” Scheme in S.1. It is conducive to enriching the teaching materials, and diversifying modes of learning and teaching.

Besides the class time, our school makes every effort to build up an English- language-rich environment. In addition to having the English teachers communicate with the students in English, the daily announcement and the school assembly are predominantly conducted in English by both teachers and students. Moreover, many of the school publications are written in English. To enhance life-wide learning, the cultural exchange program and short mission trips render great opportunities to students to communicate with the English-speakers in other countries.

Gifted Education

The school is blessed with a pool of linguistically gifted students who have the potential to engage in independent, autonomous and inquisitive enquiry where their talent is stretched through in-house and pull-out gifted programmes, along with participation in challenging competitions, e.g. Speech, debate, a curriculum catering to learner diversity, budding poet, individualized learning, etc. are made available to the students.

Assessment Components

1. Homework (news cuttings, grammar exercises, online exercises, vocabulary exercise book and projects)
2. Dictation
3. Listening exercises
4. Writing
5. Individual presentation
6. Oral discussion
7. Quiz
8. Examination

Teaching Scheme

S.1

S.2

S.3