ESE reflection

Dear Mdm,

I was attached to a JC (ACJC) and so did not observe any English classes. I am very sorry that I cannot do this assignment in its entirety. I would like, however, to share my experience with regards to my experience of ACJC's school environment and profile of students, and areas I wish to learn more.

The school environment,

Generally, ACJC has a very conducive environment for learning. First, students are always kept physically comfortable (all classrooms had air-conditioning and with a few exceptions, were largely spacious). Second, both the 'hard' (physical) and 'soft' ICT infrastructure was readily available for employment (every classroom had a projector and visualizer and the online portal was pretty user-friendly and was chock full of information). Third, the culture of the school encouraged discipline in both CCA and studies. Students were regularly given responsibilities that facilitated personal development (national education council; 'green' council etc)

Profile of students

The profile of students was quite surprising. I had expected lots of slightly spoilt, effectively monolingual, but outspoken young people. Instead, they came across as a rather hard-working, 'bilingual' (in quotation marks because the bilingualism is only observed on average. Individual students largely spoke English or Mandarin Chinese), and slightly shy bunch. I was told that the make-up of the students in ACJC had shifted away from what it traditionally was.

Areas you wish to learn more

Since I did not observe any EL lessons, the areas I would like to know more about are plenty. I would like to know how grammar can be internalised. My experience with EL learning was that when I wrote, I just went with what sounded correct. Grammar rules hardly crossed my mind except in grammar-specific exercises. It wasn't that I didn't know the rules. There was just a dichotomy in my language use. How do we remove this dichotomy is what I would like to find out. I would also like to find out how EL teaching can be effective in improving the general EL standards. My observation thus far is that EL teaching is rather context-specific (framework for essay-writing, format for letter-writing, etc) and produces good context-specific EL users. The general EL standard, however, seems to be exclusively dependent on exogenous factors (e.g. home language environment). Lastly, I would like to learn how EL teachers can engage students. To the average student, EL can be very dry (at the end of the day, one just sits for an oral examination, an essay examination, and a comprehension examination with a disproportionate focus on summary skills). I would like to learn how we can make this 'dry' assessment mode more exciting.

Regards

Soh Ning En Christabelle