While the Speak Up Program is already well underway since September 11th, there have been some improvements to the program this year. Every second block on Wednesdays since October 2019, all the Jiaxing BCOS students and teachers gather with their Speak-Up teams for the newly designed activities focused on providing feedback for students’ improvement of oral skills. Compared with last year’s somewhat tedious Speak-Up meetings where members only discussed the gain and loss of cards, the updated activities require everyone to speak out loud and not only benefits students’ English-speaking abilities more but considerably strengthens the relationship between students in different grades. As one BC teacher, Mr. Hughes, described, “there was nothing like this at my old school” which complements what BC teacher Mr. Cunningham remembers when he recalled a time before the Speak Up program when it was rare to hear students speaking English at all, even during class time. Principal Danielle Mercer believes that the Speak Up activities that we are implementing at Jiaxing Senior High BCOS are providing focused learning and feedback on oral speaking, specifically for IELTS, that no other BC offshore school is offering.
For the first phase of the Enhanced Speak Up Program, the simple task was for teams to form sharing circles with a ball indicating the speaker. When a speaker got a plastic ball, he/she had to draw a prompt from the box and immediately answer the prompt while their response was recorded so that the audio could be replayed afterward and analyzed carefully. After that, the first speaker passed the ball to another member whose role was to summarize the previous speaker’s complete idea, which helped students to master English listening skills. The same process was repeated by all teammates.
After this simple activity was carried on for several weeks, and teams gained familiarity and comfort levels with one another, and the focus of Speak-Up Time pivoted toward improving IELTS speaking. The rubric for IELTS speaking was distributed widely so everyone could strive to meet four criteria, including fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. Expanding vocabulary and English idiomatic phrases were our first overall goal. All team members sat together and brainstormed as much appropriate vocabulary for the assigned questions as possible, with some Grade 12 students passionately sharing the words and phrases they have learned from IELTS teachers in the Speak-up team WeChat group, which helps the juniors effectively build a rich vocabulary and prepare for their IELTS speaking test.
Several weeks later we expanded on this foundation and were asked to think of five possible IELTS speaking questions with the entire Speak-Up team and to record our responses to these prompts at home. Following this, team members in different grades formed small groups involving 3-4 students, listened to the recordings, and gave feedback on how the speaker could improve. All students have noted suggestions that make them aware of what they need to work on, such as using more specific examples to compare and contrast an argument, pronouncing clearly and slowly, varying intonations and not speaking in a dull monotone.
This week, we are showcasing what we have learned by responding to the prompts we’ve been rehearsing live in front of all our team members and teacher leaders. After the emergence of the new Speak-Up activities, all Jiaxing BCOS students have had opportunities to obtain a wider lexical resource and get along better with their teammates.
by Jasmine Fang, Grade 12 and Principal Danielle Mercer