Page 7 - 新生命教育協會平安福音中學（校訊2018）

Building students’ vocabulary
Using reading skills as a base, we aspire to provide students with a flexible, adaptive, rich vocabulary to help them with both their
reading, and as they create writing of their own. Our entire English Department contributes to our ‘Vocabulary Recognition Tasks’,
a series of activities to assist our students in the construction and memorisation of this essential, bountiful vocabulary. Each task is
created by a different teacher, tailor-made for the unit and year-group; this provides students with varied, challenging, and fun methods
of constructing a wealthy vocabulary.

Creative Writing Tasks

As one of the cornerstones of English production, writing is something we put tremendous effort into at PESS. Building from our class
readings and vocabulary work, we then move through intense grammar study until students are ready to be guided to write fully, from
sentence level to a paragraph level and beyond, eventually creating entire, well-structured texts suited to genre, audience and purpose.
As well as this, we believe in the power of creativity at our school, and so students are encouraged to think ‘outside the box’ and
express originality and imagination throughout the planning and writing process.

Speaking Lessons and Drama Activities

Having confidence in speaking is incredibly important when learning a language, and at PESS we strive to instill our students’ sense of
self-belief in what they are capable of. We balance intense phonics work and holistic presenting and discussing skills in our speaking
lessons. Students are given time to practise before each lesson in a ‘flipped classroom’ setting, giving them the opportunity to prepare
at home before more intense study at school.
As well as this, our engaging, enjoyable drama activities bring out the best in our students, and allow them a sense of self-expression
on stage, whilst practicing and honing their English skills at the same time. We believe that what makes learning English at PESS so
effective is this balance of concentrated phonics work, along with more relaxed, enjoyable applications of spoken language.

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