Teachers’ concerns: How can we motivate the weaker students to learn English?

1. Lok Sin Tong Yu Kan Hing School English teacher: Mr. Hung Kar Ping Drama teacher: Mr. Sin Chun Tung • Teachers’ concerns: • How can we motivate the weaker students to learn English? • How can we develop their confidence of using English?

2. Imaginative texts are interesting and appealing Language Arts activities are interactive and stimulating Language Arts Drama Drama offers a fun-filled and encouraging environment for the use of productive skills Our students have learnt some performance skills in Drama lessons

3. School-based context (building on strengths) Inter-disciplinary curriculum planning of Language Arts and Drama in Education Facilitate students to perform English Plays • Why collaborating with Drama in Education? • Develop students’ creativity and imagination • Develop students’ communication and collaboration skills • Develop students’ acting/performance skills • Develop students’ sensitivity to life experiences • Build up students’ confidence

4. Objectives • To enhance students’ motivation to learn English • To increase students’ confidence of using English • To develop students’ learning of experience strand and creativity

5. Let’s go camping (adapted from the seed project module of Ling Liang Church M H Lau Secondary School) • Tasks: • Experiencing an English camp • Experience an authentic camp and do the activities, e.g. exploring the camp facilities, sharing with the use of five-sense chart and emotions card, singing camp songs and night walk, etc. • 2. Creating and performing an ending of a play about a camping experience Adjust the task expectation and level of difficulty Scale down the unit plan Simplify the L/T materials Support from Drama teacher

6. Five-sense Chart vocabulary building sentence making (five-sense chart) (emotions journal) group sharing mini-presentation role play drama Strategies to help the weaker students to achieve the objectives • Manageable tasks • Small steps to enable students to do the tasks

7. Five-sense Chart Emotions Journal

9. Strategies to help the weaker students to achieve the objectives • 2. Collaborative learning • Group activities and group sharing in the camp to promote good communication and collaboration skills • Writing and performing the play in groups to increase students’ confidence and enhance creativity

10. Strategies to help the weaker students to achieve the objectives • 3. Inter-disciplinary collaboration • Using a lot of gestures to increase students’ learning motivation • Developing students’ performance skills to increase their interest and confidence

11. English lessons Drama lessons • Vocabulary building • five senses • emotions and feelings Recycling and reinforcing students’ learning with the use of gestures and facial expressions Singing camp songs with more focus on pronunciation Singing camp songs with gestures Helping students to understand and read aloud the play Helping students to perform the play Writing the ending for the play Helping students to brainstorm the ending with play elements Revising, editing and rehearsing with focus on writing and speaking Rehearsing with focus on performance skills

12. Impact on Learning 1. Learning attitude Students have shown much higher motivation to learn English and confidence of using English

13. Students’ Reflections

14. Impact on Learning 2. Creativity Students have demonstrated high creativity in expressing their feelings and ideas through their plays and drama performance Come on, baby. Strike me here. A poisonous apple! Many people are coming to help you!

15. Impact on Teaching • Inter-disciplinary collaboration • Be more reflective in selecting and adopting materials and strategies that suit the needs, interest and abilities of my students

16. Way forward • Incorporating the unit plan into the F.1 English Language curriculum • Exploring ways to give students opportunities to perform outside classroom to give them greater sense of achievement • Exploring possibilities to collaborate with other subjects to fully develop students’ talents and arouse their learning interest, e.g. Music, Art, Physical Education, etc.