Master classes/School visits - Homebush Public School
by Haeryun Martin On AEF Conference Day 3, my group visited an impressive Year 5 Korean language classroom (and we also did the Chinese and Tamil class observation, but I'm going to brief the Korean class obsevation only). The class had students at mixed levels/competences and from different cultural background i.e. from new arrival Korean students (not yet familiar with English instructions) to non-Korean background kids. Homebush PS offers three languages to all students. Korean heritage/background students are to learn Korean. If a student are not from those three language background, they just choose one of them and learn the language. In this way, the school is able to embed Asia perspectives across the curriculum.
It might not be ideal for many language teachers to accommodate all different levels of students in a classroom. I totally understand as I had once had a class consisting of 25 students form Years 7 to 10 at all differnt levels. I think the diffentiated programming with appropriate strategies should work in this circumstance: Differentiated programming sounds like a big 'term', but it is really simple educational concept. Just providing multiple tasks (assignments) designed (tailored) for students of different levels of achievement etc... I'm not sure whether the teacher (Ms Haeryun Martin) did her lesson with this differentiation concept or not, but she did it wonderfully with no sweat: building contexts and scaffolding as a whole, dividing her class into 3 groups and getting them on three different major tasks, teacher attention to group by group, putting teacher's expectation for peer support while doing tasks in groups/individually, and then finally the class 'story-telling' activity with their teacher.
See the slideshow below for the Korean lesson gist at Homebush Public School.
It might not be ideal for many language teachers to accommodate all different levels of students in a classroom. I totally understand as I had once had a class consisting of 25 students form Years 7 to 10 at all differnt levels. I think the diffentiated programming with appropriate strategies should work in this circumstance: Differentiated programming sounds like a big 'term', but it is really simple educational concept. Just providing multiple tasks (assignments) designed (tailored) for students of different levels of achievement etc... I'm not sure whether the teacher (Ms Haeryun Martin) did her lesson with this differentiation concept or not, but she did it wonderfully with no sweat: building contexts and scaffolding as a whole, dividing her class into 3 groups and getting them on three different major tasks, teacher attention to group by group, putting teacher's expectation for peer support while doing tasks in groups/individually, and then finally the class 'story-telling' activity with their teacher.
See the slideshow below for the Korean lesson gist at Homebush Public School.
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