ESL Classes
ESL 1
ESL 1 students generally come from backgrounds
of minimal or no schooling with no literacy in any
language. The class focuses on beginner English
language for everyday life, settlement and community
engagement, balanced with contextualised literacy
and phonics activities. This term, students came from
Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Vietnam and
China.
Achievements
relevant to our daily lives (such as phone numbers and
addresses), money, prices and calculations.
Students continued to develop knowledge of social
and settlement content relevant to their daily lives,
such as postal services, form filling, money and clothes
shopping. We went on a class excursion to a local post
office, where staff assisted us in practising transactions
such as posting a letter, buying stamps, collecting a
parcel etc. We also looked at weights and costs of
sending parcels overseas.
Students are progressing through the Preliminary
Course in Spoken and Written English. All students
demonstrated improvement in providing personal
information, reading phone numbers and copying
addresses. They expanded their vocabulary across a
range of topics, improved spelling and word-attack
skills, and some developed basic sentence structure.
Many students demonstrated communicative ability in
simple conversations and transactions, such as casual
greetings and shopping dialogues.
A great achievement was our postcard exchange, where
students practised writing short messages to each other,
copied final drafts onto postcards, addressed envelopes
and actually posted the cards to each other. For many
this was the first time they had ever addressed an
envelope, and most had never sent or received social
correspondence in English. They were thrilled when the
postcards arrived at their homes and they could read
them with their families. This is an important step in
encouraging students to learn outside the classroom
and engage in social literacy activities.
We also had a stronger numeracy focus this term,
working on numbers from 30 to 100, numbers
A fantastic addition to the classroom has been our
new set of computers with upgraded programs for
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Fitzroy Learning Network Annual Report 2011/12