Sharing of Teaching Resources: Teachers work magic on students’ confidence |
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| Teachers' Information |
- Ms TANG Sau-king, Ms LAU Lai-ching, Ms TANG Wan-ki, Ms HO Wai-ping
- Fung Kai Innovative School
- Teachers presented with the Award of Chief Executive’s Award for Teaching Excellence (2018/2019)
- Subjects Taught: English Language
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| Teaching Philosophy |
| Self-motivation is the key to success. By equipping students with the skills to become independent and self-motivated writers, the teachers boost their confidence and develop them into lifelong learners. |
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| Teachers' Sharing |
| Motivation is the magic key to success |
| We strongly believe that motivation is conducive to student engagement in learning. Therefore, students lacking motivation in learning English is always a problem every language teacher has to face. To enhance students’ motivation in learning English, we have designed and implemented a school-based “Independent Writer Project” for P.1 to P.6 students. It aims to shape our students into independent and confident writers. |
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| Developing a school-based writing curriculum |
| We have adopted the Self-Determination Theory as the guiding framework for the “Independent Writer Project”. Making reference to the element of competence, autonomy and relatedness in the theory, we have reviewed and re-shuffled our e-textbook materials, and integrated listening, speaking, reading and writing skills into the “Independent Writer Project”. |
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| To shape our students into independent and confident writers, we build up their writing competence through cyclic learning. Foundation was laid starting from Primary 1. We use mind mapping to help junior students compose their own writing framework for an authentic theme such as ‘Me’. The ‘Me’ theme is recycled in mind mapping practices and linked to new topics such as ‘Me and my Pet’ and ‘Me and my Favourite Toy’. Building on their understanding and mastery of previous writing topics, students can extend their ideas in the new writing tasks. Boxes attached to the nodes in the mind maps help students organise ideas in logistic sequence. During writing, students with different learning abilities are given autonomy to create new nodes so that they could write freely and creatively. They are trained to retrieve vocabulary and structures learnt in the e-textbook or readers so as to develop ideas into sentences and paragraphs. This practice helps students improve writing competence and encourage them to be more independent and confident in writing. |
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| Complementing the recurring writing themes related to ‘Me’, we also create a language rich environment and use diverse student-centred activities with carefully scaffolded learning tasks to help students develop the writing skills progressively. We let students choose authentic writing topics. For example, Primary 4 students are asked to write about their favourite teachers. They have the autonomy to design a questionnaire in groups before they interview their favourite teachers. The writing task provides them with an opportunity to conduct an interview in English in a familiar environment. Equipped with the language competence obtained from this experience, students interview overseas visitors in the Sai Kung and Stanley excursions in Primary 5. Then, students have to write about their favourite teachers in Primary 6 again. They need to conduct a teacher interview individually and decide on which teacher they would interview and what questions they would ask. The real-life experience and first-hand information create a sense of learner autonomy which makes them feel they own their writing. Students’ writing abilities have become increasingly sophisticated both in terms of content and language. More importantly, students’ attitudes towards learning English has become more positive and their motivation in writing much enhanced. |
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| The sense of achievement in helping our students become lifelong independent learners is the greatest source of self-intrinsic motivation to the English teachers. We made the changes and feel proud of the success in teaching and the achievements in student learning. |
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| Sharing of Resources |
| Teaching Practices |
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| Sharing Teaching Materials |
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| 頂端 |