Good Practice

Video Transcript

The teacher welcomes the pupils in both Mandarin and English.

Teacher's commentary: My pupils are from different family backgrounds if you like. Many of them have Chinese influences; they might speak Chinese all the time at home, some of them will speak Mandarin, and some of them speak Cantonese. I would say the majority of them will speak English because they grew up here, even their parents have connections with China or Asia. I have two girls, for example, they are from Malaysia. Their parents are from Malaysia so they speak their own Malay and not really Chinese at all so they come to learn Mandarin in my class.

In my class I have a very very mixed group of students. The youngest one is just 6 years old and the eldest is about 14 years old. So it’s a really mixed group of students in terms of age and ability as well. I would say it's a very typical community class.
Today we were talking about the subject 'Why?' The lesson is based on the textbook we used for their level ability and the lesson encouraged them to ask questions. The whole lesson focused on how to use 'why' in the sentence and how to, most importantly, encourage them to be inquisitive; to be more curious about what's going on maybe and that is a good way to encourage them to go further in their studies or in their lives.

But in terms of language points, we need to learn a few objects like the sun, the moon, the river, the lake, the birds, the fish and then using 'why' to encourage them to ask some simple questions.

In my planning I'm focusing on the 4 skills which are required for them for the communication for the exams in the future. In my class I would say I'm more focused on reading and writing because they do have the opportunity to listen and to speak some of them in their home. So for example today we were talking about why, and at first I encouraged them to talk and how to say that and how to put it in a sentence so we did a few objects which I wanted to encourage them to ask why something like the moon, the sun, the fish. They always like their yes or no, correct or not correct questions. So I would use 'is it correct' after I taught them the words I’d asked them to identify the words and recognise the characters I would use 'correct or not' as a first step.

So we do some writing in the address sheet and I encourage them to write a few sentences, using them in practice. The textbook is very well-structured as well which covers the skills but the writing part, as I said, is very important with normally, in each book, in each lesson, there are new words, new vocabularies they need to learn and the book will show you how to write the characters in the correct strokes, in the correct order, which is the important part to learn to remember the characters and students always have the opportunity to do that.