Week 2

Australia is in many ways different from my expectations. This week I visited an international school offering mainstream VCE (Victoria Certificate Examination) courses to students in grade 10-12 and a program called MUFY (Monash University Foundation Years) for students who plan to go to the Monash University. Although the school itself, being built in a 10-story commercial building, is not considered to be a mainstream school, I expected that the teaching methodology employed would be of a spectacular Australian kind, part of which I have learnt in my PGDE classes. Surprisingly, the lessons I observed largely resembled what we have in Hong Kong, except, probably, for its much smaller class size of around 20 students. Notably, most of the lessons were dominated by teacher-talk. Student participation was limited to presentations, but peer-activities and interactivity were lacking. To be fair, it has to be noted that the teachers did inform us in advance that since it was drawing close to the end of the term, they were actually doing more revisions and preparation for exam. Nevertheless, there was something in which that I did see a difference. During one of the ESL lessons, students prepared an oral review on a book which they had just gone through in class. Remarkably, one of the students, a Chinese girl, spoke in a heavy accent that one may occasionally find hard to comprehend. However, she was very well prepared, using posters and props in her presentation, and spoke fluently and in an organized manner in spite of the accent. The teacher appreciated her very much and eventually gave her the highest score. If the same student was in Hong Kong, chances were that she would not be appreciated as much. And this we have to learn.