Thanks a lot for your constructive critique. Great job.
Our kids are very young learners, they need to process the language they are learning, thus they need more and more practice before they can use it in different situations. Unfortunately, the opportunities given to them are quite insufficient. Three hours a week constitute a very short time for such a long, complex and complicated programme. All the teachers confess they do everything hurriedly without serious assessments and remedial work or further practice. I believe that this didn't allow our pupils to acquire the needed competencies and that's why they show great weaknesses at many levels:
-While dealing with "practice" sessions", pupils show great difficulties at the interpretive competency level. The areas of weaknesses can be located at: finding and recognizing necessary information in new articles on familiar subjects. They are sometimes unable to make connections between the sentences in the paragraph, use linguistic signals and typographical signals and graphical and relationship markers to make predictions and grasp global meaning.
-Being unable to interpret exactly what they are expected to do, the pupils will inevitably be unable to produce very correct answers and use the right information at a very high rate.
Being subjects to brief, hasty and rash practice, our pupils will be permanently unable to cope with the BEM question paper that's based upon these competencies.
Can our poor children provide something they don't possess?
Are our children victims of certain circumstances?
Is this educational system the right one to train our children?
Are we convinced of what we are doing?
Are we also victims of the same case?
Our kids need us to help them practice. We must find a way to give them this opportunity. The only trouble is they need to practice:
- Comprehension with lots of activities and feedback.
- Speaking with varied types of discussions and tasks.
- Writing with many modules of integration and remedial work.
It would be ideal if we manage to. Who can do all this in 3 hours time a week?
A real challenge?
Salam,