Speaking
EFL has crafted two new speaking programmes; “Speakers’ Club” and “Public Speaking & Creative Writing”. The aim is to develop competency and train confident communicators among the students through systematic delivery of different themes of public speeches. Students’ speaking curriculum consists of two activities i.e., prepared speeches and impromptu speeches. They are to be carried out during the tutorial class.
There are 7 presentation projects in each level which are carefully crafted and designed for the prepared speeches in the speakers’ club. During the course of public speaking, the teacher will set the class in the form of a meeting room. While the role of the teacher is to evaluate the language and the speeches of the speakers, each student will get to participate in different roles throughout the proceedings. They are the project speakers, the timer (to keep track of the speaker’s timing) and the “Fillers Counter” (to record of the speaker’s redundant fillers). Hence, it is to inculcate good listening skills, leadership and responsibilities among the students. The speaker’s club is a new initiative programme which was meticulously tailored into the EFL curriculum to enhance the students’ language development and enhancing interactional competency.
Reading
One of the most effective ways to improve a students’ writing is through designing a good intensive and extensive reading program in the curriculum. The EFL reading curriculum is a systematic method where students learn both passive and active reading through our designed course of study.
Reading is conducted during the lessons, after which the teacher will then prompt the students to discuss about the story they have read in the class. From the verbal summary of the story, the students are encouraged to transfer the summarized story into their journal. Through this process, students will learn about summarizing skills, comprehension and vocabulary.
Most students do passive reading and therefore are not trained to transfer their reading in terms of vocabulary learned and phrases into their writing. Therefore a built in self-reading curriculum was designed into the EFL tutorial curriculum to improve students’ language accuracy and fluency through our structured reading curriculum.
Writing
The EFL writing programme accounts for 25% of the curriculum as we are aware of the importance of writing from a tender age of 5 would further enhance the students’ language proficiency. EFL has created a tutorial program that is robust enough to match enrichment classes in terms of integration of the 4 skills but with the advantage of providing the depth that is required to see results both in school and international exams like Singapore entrance test or UK IELTS exams. The writing curriculum is designed based on the process method (Susser, 1994); and starting early with the 5 year old students would give them an advantage over the rest of their peers in school. The tools used in the classroom by teachers are brainstorming, mind-mapping and drafting of essay body structure.
Listening
EFL decided to enforce a listening activity of the same duration as the other skills like speaking and reading for students aged 5 years old. The material used is a series from Australia after much consideration into the variety of listening materials in the market. This series was chosen because it offered a variety of interesting and engaging story lines. The book also provides glossary for every unit; and it becomes useful as teachers get students to write sentences based on the glossary introduced during the listening activity. For students in the other age group, a series of listening materials from Australia is used to provide them with diverse listening practises thereby building the students’ confidence in contextual listening.
Services
Copyright 2013 EFL International Education Group