Diversified teaching strategies promote English development and achieve "self-motivated and happy learning"

South Yuen Long Government Primary School is committed to enhancing students’ independent learning abilities through diversified teaching strategies, broadening students’ learning experiences, and cultivating students to become “self-motivated and happy learners.” The school has a simple school spirit, which places equal emphasis on training and assistance, and encourages students to develop their potential and improve themselves. Principal Wu Dan attaches great importance to the development of students' English ability. Through diversified teaching strategies, he designs appropriate school-based courses and extracurricular activities in response to students' learning diversity, creating a strong English learning environment, starting from daily life, enriching students' learning experience and developing multiple intelligences, so as to promote their all-round development of English.

New Directions in English Teaching: Penetrating Values Education

The school integrates English courses and values education, and infiltrates education into students' closely related campus life. For example, in the water sports meeting held earlier, foreign teachers invited students to serve as emcees and were responsible for interviewing parents, teachers and contestants. The school hopes that even if students do not win the competition, they can still experience the mentality of friendship first and competition second during the visit; students with excellent performance in the competition can enhance their self-confidence and sense of success.

In addition, the school holds a role-playing competition every Christmas. Students can play their favorite characters or choose relevant characters to play based on this year's Chinese cultural theme. They need to perform roles on the school stage that day, interpret the storyline in English, and interact and ask questions with classmates and teachers. In addition to training English communication skills, they also practice ways to cultivate English ability in daily life.

Promote observation activities combined with English and set goals to achieve self-growth

The school hopes that students can have an in-depth understanding of the day's work of library teachers, so that students can know the efforts of these teachers and be grateful for them. They need to observe the daily work of library teachers, such as organizing books in the library and explaining books to classmates. The work content also includes classifying books and assisting librarians in their work. Through the activities, the school hopes that students will understand the punctuality, carefulness, good communication skills and other characteristics required to become a library teacher, so as to plant the seeds for students' career planning and think about whether they have these conditions. If students think they are lacking, the school also encourages them to improve themselves with an introspective attitude.

During the library experience, students not only understand the work content of library teachers, but also inspire their determination to broaden their horizons and strengthen their learning goals. To this end, the school has specially planned a unit to lead students to make plans, guide students to plan their goals for the day or the coming year, and write an article in English to show their friends or teachers their goals and how to achieve them. Principal Wu pointed out: "This unit is not only a goal-setting process, but also an opportunity to learn English. Students try to express their goals and practical processes in English, improve their English proficiency in practical applications, master more knowledge, promote their progress and improvement, and then achieve self-growth."

Interdisciplinary project learning and preparation of diverse learning activities

The school actively promotes cross-disciplinary thematic learning, and this year launched new multi-learning activities that cleverly integrate elements of humanities and sciences to provide students with a richer and more comprehensive learning experience. In the diversified learning activities, English will serve as an important component. At the end of the project study, relevant English knowledge will be taught on the topic, such as new words and professional terms, so as to lay an early foundation for them in English. For example, when it comes to environmental protection issues in fifth grade, the school will introduce special English nouns related to environmental protection so that they can be exposed to English terms that they may encounter in middle school in advance.

In addition, the school plans to hold a multi-learning day, which will focus on environmental issues and humanistic care, incorporating values ​​such as caring for the earth, cherishing it, and being grateful, so as to cultivate students' environmental awareness and humanistic qualities, and at the same time improve their English skills. At the same time, the school also realizes that understanding the history of the motherland and Yuen Long District is an important part of education. The district has a long history, and the school, as an old school with more than a century of history, has a greater responsibility to pass on this history.

Principal Wu said: "In future multi-learning activities, we will appropriately integrate the content of Chinese culture and English courses so that students can understand the history of the motherland and Yuen Long District while also improving their English proficiency. The multi-learning activities will be a comprehensive activity integrating humanities, science and English to help students obtain comprehensive development of knowledge and enhance their learning interests and abilities."

Connection and adaptation strategies to control students’ learning progress

The school uses flexible and open assessment methods to help kindergartens connect with primary schools. For example, in the early stage of Primary One, fun word games are used to replace traditional silent reading, and different assessment models are introduced, such as student self-evaluation, peer assessment, and parent evaluation scales, etc., so that Primary One students can reduce stress while also achieving the goal of assessment and improvement.

As the semester progresses, the learning model will gradually become consistent with other grades, ensuring that students can improve their English learning abilities in a relatively smooth process. The school understands that it is crucial for students to adapt to the new learning pace. Therefore, the teaching process will not be too urgent, so as to prevent students from finding it difficult to adapt and develop resistance to English. Through comprehensive adaptation strategies, we help students gradually get used to and enjoy the process of learning English.

Innovative English teaching environment to promote interactive communication between teachers and students

Some of the school's English classes are taught in the English room. The layout and design of the English room are very different from traditional classrooms. In addition to being equipped with desk lamps, bookshelves and other facilities, a large number of English posters are also posted, creating a strong and interesting English learning atmosphere. Innovation is not limited to classroom furnishings. Foreign teachers will also help students consolidate the knowledge they have learned through book sharing and classroom worksheets. These activities allow students to have a deeper understanding of English sentence structure, grammar and vocabulary, and also encourage them to actively speak in class, gradually establishing an English learning system.

Principal Wu added: "English classes allow students to deepen what they have learned and cultivate their ability to learn independently through meaningful extension activities. In addition, in addition to teaching, our foreign English teachers will also go to different classrooms after class to communicate with classmates, providing students with opportunities to apply English knowledge to life, and further shortening the distance between teachers and students, making students more willing and courageous to express their opinions and express themselves in English in class."

Encourage participation in English competitions, devote yourself to learning and develop self-confidence

In order to further improve students' English proficiency, the school encourages students to participate in various English competitions. For example, foreign teachers led students to participate in the Filmit 2025 short film competition. In the process, they not only learned film editing skills, but also encouraged them to practice their English expression skills in the competition. In addition, the school is also holding a Chinese word competition in the auditorium this year. The teacher will tell the students in advance the range of new words that need to be spelled before the game, conduct a preliminary competition in the classroom, and then select the winning contestants to participate in the finals. Afterwards, the representatives selected from each class will compete in the finals. The atmosphere is warm and full of fun, which makes the students more engaged in learning English and cultivates their collective sense of honor and team spirit.

Specially purchase vocabulary books to accumulate rich English vocabulary

The school focuses on improving students' English vocabulary. To this end, it has specially purchased vocabulary books so that students can be exposed to English words outside the textbooks so that they can have more word choices when writing. Students can also think about more different sentence combinations and choose synonyms with different difficulties during the learning process, which increases the fun and sense of success. The school also encourages students to use online resources to find vocabulary, which can not only cultivate the spirit of independent learning, but also accumulate more words and gain learning confidence. The school works with students to create a good English learning environment to help students continuously improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.