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Sharing of Teaching Resources 2015 : Success is the sum of small efforts

Teachers’ Information

  • Ms KONG Kit-yi, Ms WONG Mei-chu, Ms LIU Qianzhao
  • Ning Po College
  • Teachers presented with the Award of Chief Executive's Award for Teaching Excellence (2014/2015)
  • Subject taught: English Language

Teaching Philosophy

"Many small streams make one big river." With persistence and concerted efforts, a team of dedicated teachers taking tiny steps towards building an authentic English learning culture in their school has proven a big success in transforming the school culture and raising students' English standard. At Ning Po College, the term of English teachers named their efforts "CHANCE".

Teachers’ Sharing

Conceptual framework - CHANCE

"CHANCE" is the six necessary stages for developing our students into proficient language learners possessing both confidence and competence. They include: Confidence; Habit; Awareness; New experiences; Challenge; Empowerment.

Confidence: building students' confidence

To build up students' confidence in using English, we decided to start off by developing students' speaking abilities with "5-min reading aloud time". It involves reading aloud of literary texts ranging from poems to scripts for role play. The subsequent step to the "reading aloud" activity is "10-min speaking activities". As language teachers, we clearly understand that the stronger or more active students will dominate while weaker students will remain silent in speaking activities which lack careful planning. We have therefore introduced "mini strategies" as part of our classroom strategies to ensure that students can take part in every class and feel secure to participate in classroom activities.

Habits: sustaining students' learning by habit formation

As the confidence building strategies start to achieve results and students start to form good learning habits, their learning is further sustained by learning processes, such as participation in mini projects, through which students familiarise themselves with co-operative learning strategies, such as peer-learning, presentation in groups. These learning processes can enable students to form independent learning habits that are vital to facilitate lifelong learning. In order to sustain students' commitment on a regular basis, free-writing is also introduced to encourage students to write in authentic situations. This strategy can help students overcome the hurdle of writing by encouraging them to develop the habit of free writing.

Awareness: raising students' language awareness

5-min SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) Teaching is implemented to reinforce students' understanding of common sentence patterns. Students' language awareness is further raised through the 10-min Mental Processing Time, which offers regular bite-size reading and mini reading tasks during class time. These activities can help students grasp the basic fabrics of the English Language.

New experiences, Challenges and Empowerment

As students are getting more ready to move up the ladder and take on even higher challenges, a wide variety of English activities and inter-school competitions and opportunities for them to take on roles of organisers are provided. These serve as "New experiences" and "Challenges" that stimulate students and keep them engaged and motivated. The last stage of "Empowerment" emphasises the importance for learners to operate freely in real-life communicative situations and be able to appreciate different cultures through the language. Our students in higher levels are able to benefit from these provisions.

Sharing of Resources

Teaching Practices

“CHANCE” Model

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