Reflection on School Visit: Fuhsing Private School

The appearance of business building impressed me when I first glance round the Fuhsing Private School. It is a school that extremely focus on English education, starting early at the kindergarten level. Since students learn English so early that their English proficiency are much higher than students at the same age. Its successful English education mainly attributes to the development of the English Research Center founded in 1993. The center was aimed to develop English curriculum covering from kindergarten to junior high school and to design English related activities in order to increase students’ learning motivation. Their success was proved by showing the result of the Basic Competence Test - half of their exam takers got full grades in English. The gorgeous accomplishment on English education made me curious about the real classroom activities in this school.

The classroom activities are summarized as follows.
Warm-up activity – landmark of cities or countries around the world
1. The teacher asked which place they would take their friends to if he/she first came to Taiwan. Some students said their answers like Yaming Mountain or Taipei 101 loudly.
2. After that, the students were required to write down the landmarks of the cities or countries in the sheet provided by their teacher. When the students finished writing, the teacher discussed the answers with them by showing the photographs of those landmarks with PowerPoint.
3. The teacher wanted her students to practice the sentence “I have been to ….” by asking them what country they have been to.

Main activity – sentence pattern practice
4. The teacher showed some sentence pattern with on the PowerPoint. Each slide contained only one sentence pattern with clues. For example, “_______ _______ for ________ me” and
V O Ving
“_______ have _____ _____ on _______”
Pron V-en Pron N
5. The students who were chosen by lot had to make a sentence according to the grammatical rules given on the slide. If students could not make one, the teacher provided more hints, in this case more words shown.
6. After two or three sentences were made for each sentence pattern, the teacher presented the complete sentence that she prepared previously.
7. Informing that those sentences were taken from their textbook, the teacher asked her students to listen to the dialogue twice by playing the CD. At the first time, they just listened, but they were required to fill in the blanks at the second time.
8. As the writing was finished, the students checked their answers from their textbooks.

Sum-up activity – comprehension questions
9. The teacher asked all students some questions related to the dialogue they just listened. The purpose of these questions was to examine if students understood the content of the dialogue.
10. When one question was proposed, each student wrote down her answer on the plastic folder and raised it high. If all answers were correct, next question continued.

Although the procedure of presenting materials were nothing new (bottom-up process), the way she delivered the materials differed from conventionally teacher-oriented instruction. The teacher spent lots of time (around 20 minutes) on extra materials, namely landmarks of other cities or countries, even though the topic of this unit was limited on London only. Using authentic pictures of those landmarks also made learning more meaningful and increased students’ motivation. Moreover, instead of deductively explaining grammatical rules, the teacher asked students to create sentences on their own. This not only raised their awareness of the sentence pattern, but forced them to think to make a grammatical sentence. Finally, the use of plastic folders, rather than papers, as tools for answering comprehension questions was a really intelligent idea. If all teachers followed this idea, we could save a lot of trees in the world.

However, the classroom activities were not flawless. I have some suggestions for this lesson in terms of the form of activity, students’ anxiety, and the use of PowerPoint. I noticed that all activities were individual without any cooperation among students though few students could get help from others, but just in private. To some extent, group work would facilitate better outcome in learning and lower their learning anxiety. The students’ anxiety increased when they stood up to answer questions. One student even stood for a long time just because she could not answer the question. If it was a group work, students could help each other in order to solve the problem. The last point was the unclear writing on the PowerPoint because of the sun shine. When we sat at the back row watching the slides, we hardly recognized the words on the slides, not mention to the students. Therefore, these three points needed to be improved.a