Creative writing skills, complex grammatical structures and vocabulary are built up through reading comprehension tasks and specialist writing tasks. Building up complex sentence structures from basic sentences. Improving vocabulary skills through a variety of activities. English is a language of pictures, idioms and non-literal structures which makes the language difficult to master. We use technology to help students understand both words and context. We take what children do when learning their first language and condense it down to speed up how they acquire a second language, concentrating on what they need to do and what they need to know.
Regular work on producing English sounds and work with spelling rules. Working through how children here learn to spell using basic phonics and syllables. For older children teaching them how words are commonly misspelled so they can look for common mistakes in words they do not know. We cannot teach the student ALL the words they may need, English has too many, but we can teach them what sort of misspelling they might see in the AEAS test. We teach the skills pragmatically – what do they need to know – what do they need to be able to do – what method of learning works for them!
While many Chinese students have advanced mathematics when compared to most Australian students, the language used may cause problems for the students. Therefore students should be exposed to technical English terms through Mathematics. Students here are exposed to mathematical terminology quite early in Primary school hence students will need to do some “Mathematical English”. In English there are many ways to ask a student to complete the same task and the student needs to be able to understand what is required. Many good schools expect students to be able to answer wordy ‘story’ style problems rather than just do the ‘number crunching’, often with questions containing material which is not pertinent to the problem being solved forcing the student to identify the important bits of information in order to answer the question.
Coming soon