We are pleased to present to you the PSLE Oral English Mastery Course. Through this course, we will help your children become confident and fluent English speakers. Besides excelling in the examinations, being a confident speaker can impress the listener and help children in both their inter-personal communication and future prospects, from impressing the job interviewers, convincing the boss with their presentations and proposals or succeeding as a salesman.
In many school, the focus is in the written components of the EL papers, and the Oral English Examination is considered a minor component in the English Language subject. However, given its new and increased weightage of 15%, it can make the difference between passing and failing, and between getting A* and A, or even pull the EL grade from a C to an A*!
NEW PSLE Exam Format (wef 2015)
In view of the NEW PSLE Syllabus and Assessment Objectives that the Ministry of Education has introduced, the PSLE Oral English Mastery Course is a 8-week course that will take your child through the skills necessary to excel in both components in the PSLE English Oral Examinations. This is in line with the MOE’s requirement for students to be more social and interactive, improving their social skills for the 21st Century.
Beginning from 2015,
[su_quote class=”quoteexaminers”]examiners will be looking out for the students’ ability to demonstrate critical thinking and effective communication skills in the oral examination[/su_quote]
and children cannot excel by simply studying or revising alone. They need to build their confidence and hone their skills by interacting with different people in different contexts. They need to be coached, and this means they will need to
- Practise both reading as well as conversing,
- Receive feedback on their performance,
- Receive instruction on how to improve,
- Reflect on other ways to improve and then
- Try again and again to improve.
Problems
The Ministry of Education announced several major changes to the English syllabus in 2012 which, while being in the right direction, have made preparation more difficult and time-consuming for the teachers.
Even before the changes, most teachers would have focussed most of the curriculum time on the written components, giving little attention to the oral component, given that the weightage is biased towards the written components. The new changes actually require even more attention for both the written and oral components so teachers will be hard-pressed for time both ways, making it even more difficult to help the students be fully prepared and confident to excel in the oral examination.
Doing well with the new format requires a lot more individual coaching but teachers in school simply cannot afford the time.[/su_box]
To help each pupil excel in the oral examination, EL teachers will have to train the pupils by
- Giving each of them the chance to practise and then
- Giving each of them individual feedback
but it is nearly impossible for teachers to do that, with the time constraint teachers face, with their many duties and responsibilities on their plates and their limited time. Completing the syllabus would already have been a feat. Helping students excel requires sacrifices from both teachers and students that are sometimes impossible to make.
Solution
We believe we can raise the standard of your Child’s performance in the oral examinations with our experience and our programme that gives each child more personal attention, evaluation, feedback and coaching, while in a group setting for realistic and synergistic role-playing to create authentic response, as well as build confidence for each child.
So Clever will provide individual attention and coaching
- Group interaction
- Practice sessions
- Personalised feedback and remedy
- Video recordings
- Written feedback
- Mock examinations
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Unlike teachers who are juggling many duties and responsibilities within the limited time they have, we are dedicated towards helping students excel in the oral examination. In EVERY session, our students will have the chance to
- Practise in front of the group and the trainer,
- Learn to look out for what the Examiner wants by observing one another, and
- Receive individual feedback from the trainer in each session.
Many children who can speak well may clam up in front of examiners because they have stage fright and they lack self-confidence. We believe that group sessions will
- be less intimidating
- help children build up confidence
- help children in their ability to formulate responses by observing and learning from other students
We will also organise mock examinations to help your child overcome stage fright and build up confidence. With enough practice, your child will be able to communicate effectively and naturally and excel during the oral examinations and they can carry this skill into the future and perform well during presentations and interviews.
Videos of each student’s performance are taken and reviewed in the each lesson. Every child is coached and then filmed again. Dramatic improvements can be seen in the 2nd video that is taken, and the success is celebrated, helping the student to achieve tangible success.
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The Use of Videos of the Children in Every Session
A new teaching concept we are using in each class is the use of video recordings of the students’ performance for
- Immediate evaluation, review and remedy with the students
- In a safe, positive and encouraging environment.
We have found this to be highly successful, not only in helping the student achieve and experience success when he hears and sees himself reading and interacting with the Examiner, and then improving dramatically upon making specific changes upon our recommendation, but also in learning how to observe and listen out for good reading and communication.
Besides the immediate feedback given to the students by the trainer in person during each of the sessions, we will also provide written feedback and recommended tips for improvement to the parents and students, sent after each lesson.
Frameworks to Help the students Converse With Confidence on Any Given Topic
With the new Stimulus-Based Conversation in Section 2, students are often jittery and unsure of what to say and how to organise their thoughts such that they are able to effectively communicate their opinions and ideas to the examiners.
With Frameworks, students are able to converse with the Examiners on any given topic, and present their thoughts in a well-organised, mature manner.
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We will be bringing the children through real-world scenarios, not only to highlight current affairs in the local context, but more so to
- Familiarise the children with the Content-Creating Frameworks that we will be teaching them
- Putting themselves in the shoes of the various characters they are playing, done through Role Playing in the small-group setting in each session, which immediately raises the maturity level in the opinions and ideas that the children produce, after being able to look at the topic on hand from another person’s perspective, such as the elderly aunties in the food courts who work at clearing the heavy food trays in spite of their age, pains and aches.
This helps the children create sensible, sound content, and device sensible opinions and ideas which will help them
- Not only for the Stimulus-Based Conversation segment in the Oral Examination, but
- Also in the writing components in Paper 1, especially in creating sensible content for both narrative and non-narrative prose in the Continuous Writing segment.
Parents can also use the videos and written feedback to help their children practise engaging in conversation in real-world situations especially when the family is out and about, creating more authentic environments for communication.