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Scottish schools full of Eastern promise
Andrew Beach
When the little girl in P3 greeted Jia Bin with a cheery "Ni Hao", the newly-arrived Chinese language assistant at St George's School in Edinburgh says she was bowled over by the confidence in a foreign language the girl showed.
"I was really surprised - before I came to Scotland I had never been out of China and I just could not imagine pupils at such a young age starting to greet people in a foreign language. It is a great thing."
Jia is on a one-year British Council Chinese Language Assistant scheme secondment to St George's from the school where she teaches in South West China, and it's giving her a close look at an important development in language teaching here.
St George's has been teaching Chinese since 1995, but recent years have seen a significant widening in the scope of its operations. A Chinese club is offered in P3, and from P4 Chinese is part of the curriculum. The school last year opened the first of eight Chinese Government-supported Confucius Classroom Hubs now in operation across Scotland, which will provide resources and facilities for teaching Chinese for local schools.
Chinese probationer teachers
Jia is working with two full-time probationer Chinese teachers, Rachel Tsai and Li Zhang, who both trained as part of the first PGDE in Chinese cohort at Moray House School of Education at the University of Edinburgh.
Rachel said she is finding being a teacher in Scotland very different from her experience as an English teacher in Taiwan. "I find teachers here very well trained and very professional in their working ethos and I enjoy working here very much. The culture at St George's is to allow the teacher to express their own personality, their own way of teaching, and I find that suits me very well. I use a lot of games with the class, role playing, drama, various mediums - it's been a lot of fun teaching in my first year."
Li also taught English in China and agrees it is a very different teaching environment. "In particular, the class sizes are very different. In China, you have about 60 children in a class, so you need a loud voice. At St George's, as well as teaching language, we also do a lot of cultural things, such as calligraphy and cooking, which students really enjoy. They are so motivated and enjoy the course, and I think that actually the progress they are making is very good. When I first met them, they could read very short paragraphs and not write a lot, but now they can write a whole page, telling stories - I am amazed by what they can do now and what they have achieved."
Developing Chinese teaching in Scotland
Head teacher Judith McClure, who is convenor of the Scotland-China Education Network, said the involvement of GTCS had been very important in developing Chinese teaching in Scotland. "It's got to be properly taught, it can't just be an add-on.
"The teaching must be done by people who are qualified in the teaching and learning strategies we are developing in Scotland and that is one of the reasons why the Chinese themselves are so interested in what is going on here.
"Everything we hear from the Education Ministry in Beijing reflects the creativity they see here, and I'm sure at the root of that is what the GTCS has been working for - the development of teaching and learning, professionalism of teachers and the way this empowers young people to be independent learners."
She said St. George's now has more than 200 students studying Chinese. "Last year we got non-native speakers up to GCSE level and they did very well, and I hope next year we will have our first non-native speaker Advanced Higher student."
There are regular visits between St George's and schools in China. Judith says these trips are a fantastic CPD opportunity for teachers - "it's not just a case of pupils learning, it's teachers learning. We have our teachers going to visit schools in Hong Kong, in Kunming - that is the best CPD you can have."
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would like to knowthe GTCS view on this scenario. I agree with Steve its a last option!
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