Visit II: Melbourne Grammar Senior School

The second school visit.

What a stark contrast to the previous school.



The Melbourne Grammar School is a private boys' school, with its population of students mostly European, along with around 20% - 30% Asians. The campus is gargantuan, and it doesn't at all look like a secondary school. It looks more like a university, with its own cinema, performance hall, orchestra rehearsal hall, dormitories, standard swimming pool, gym, weight room... the list could go on and on.







Although the hardware is so advanced and developed, I found that the approaches used in teaching another language is very similar to that of Hong Kong. My observations were based on two lessons - Year 11 German and Year 11 French.

In the German class, the theme of the lesson is on the German school system, e.g. in what year do children study kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, the subject streaming, etc, and the main foci are vocabulary and pronunciation along a bit of grammar as well. In that lesson, as far as the staging is concerned, there didn't seem to much staging, as students were given worksheets, which seemed to photocopies, to work on, and the teacher would ask students for answers. There was also a reading part where the students were given a German text, and students took turns reading. The teacher usually asked for peer correction before giving her own feedback. There was also a teaching assistant who acted as an advisor and went around the room to check on students' progress as they were working on their worksheets and answer any questions they might have.

Aside from the extra teaching assistant, the lesson was very similar to typical English lessons in Hong Kong, where worksheets and exercises are given and language is practiced through repeated drilling. The main difference is the teacher needed not try very hard to extract responses from the students. In Hong Kong classrooms, students are usually very reluctant to speak up or ask questions.

In the French class, there was only one teacher, and the focus was on direct and indirect speech as well as listening. This class was very similar to the German class, where students were given worksheets, and the teacher asked for answers after a certain amount of time.

Though both classes were mainly taught in English, in the latter class, the teacher liked to code-switch and use the target language to pose questions to the students. The students usually were able to comprehend what the teacher had asked.

For the French class, in the listening part, the teacher stopped the tape when she saw that her students were having difficulties and read the tape script herself at a slower pace. She then played the tape again for her students to check their answers. This doesn't not usually happen in Hong Kong classrooms. Teachers usually play the tape once and then check the answers with the students. I think the approach used by the French teacher is a lot more effective because we need to take into consideration the students' standard in the target language when giving them tasks.

It could be just me, but it seems that while the hardware of the school is very developed and modern, the teaching methods adopted by the teachers are quite traditional.