What are your approaches to teach students of different year groups and coming with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds? How do you help students prepare for future learning in Senior School, or even beyond?

We adopt different teaching methods according to students' different abilities and ages.

For non-native students, we emphasise the practice of language or interpersonal abilities. The core of learning for these students consists in using Chinese to communicate in daily life situations. For that purpose, we use different foreign language learning methods, such as communication practice, listening and speaking practices as well as body language responsive practice.
For native speakers, we focus on learning the academic language, emphasising their reading and writing proficiency, along with their ability to read and appreciate Chinese literature, so that students possess the ability to understand and interpret, to present and deliver speeches.
For younger students such as Year 3s, we mainly aim to build up their oral expression by developing their vocabulary and logical thinking and start guiding them through the basics of writing. For Year 4 students, we further emphasise the logic and accuracy of oral expression and target at writing specific paragraphs and chapters.
Older students in Year 5 and Year 6 further explore reading and writing, with the goal of increasing their ability to read about a larger variety of subjects. We also expect them to be able to grasp different types of narrative writing and have the ability to make speeches and debate about various age-appropriate topics. Meanwhile, we expect the older Junior School students to be able to understand basic classical Chinese writings and to possess a certain understanding of ancient Chinese history.

We pay great attention to the ability of reading and writing in Junior School. This is to prepare them for Chinese learning in Senior School and future. Through massive reading and systematic writing training, we build a foundation for students to be prepared for various international Chinese exams in the future.

We have recently introduced the Level Chinese platform to test and evaluate students’ reading ability every year, to make Chinese teaching and learning more scientific and systematic. The recent evaluation results of our students on Level Chinese have proved that our Chinese teaching and learning are very effective. This is a satisfying outcome for our Chinese teachers.