English Academy

Our ever-changing world means it is vital that our students develop essential language skills to prepare for their ongoing life, education, and work in the future. We want to encourage all our students to aim high and exceed their goals in language learning and to begin a love of the English language that will continue for many years to come.

Our English Academy has two complementing elements to help our students to learn English skills by giving them lots of opportunities to use English, preparing them to build their communication in a second or third language. We focus on giving our students real reasons for using the language in our lessons, so all our classes concentrate on making English immediate and meaningful.

Both Rachel and Belinda are Native English Speaking Teachers and speak English all the time at school, giving our students extra opportunities to learn both in and out of the classroom as they listen and contribute to real conversations, increasing their motivation and improving their fluency and pronunciation.

Pre-primary

Core English

In Core English lessons we use songs, games and stories and a large variety of activities to introduce language and social skills to appeal to the imagination, creating a warm and welcoming class atmosphere in order to make children enthusiastic about learning. Phonics sections will introduce the building blocks for reading and spelling skills and storybooks will be introduced to engage and delight, making language memorable.

At this age, we know that to captivate and engage young children the lessons need to interest and engage our students, so they can begin interacting in English and learning through enjoyment and having fun.

Primary

Core English at primary level will focus on developing confidence in the four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening, whilst also working towards Cambridge Exams*. Children will learn the structures of the English language enabling them to expand their vocabulary as they learn more interesting ways to communicate messages and present information. Fluency and pronunciation will be of prime importance and our students will be encouraged to make videos as well as show and tell presentations, as their confidence increases. They will be encouraged to develop their reading and writing with various tasks including writing short texts about themselves and their interests and leading eventually to short stories, mini-dialogues, and collaborative plays.

All our lessons are communication centred, inspiring and engaging each student and giving lots of opportunities for all our students to speak English at every opportunity.

English Plus

  • English Plus lessons are an extension of our Core English classes giving further opportunities for our students to use the English they have learnt there.

Our aims in English Plus classes are to:

  • Build confidence by getting more practice using functional, everyday language with their teacher and classmates so they can communicate more clearly and effectively.
  • Work on projects both individually and with other students using their own creativity and collaborating to produce functional mini-dialogues, collaborative stories, presentations, posters and theatre plays, amongst other activities.
  • Use storybooks toprovide an ideal resource for helping our students to learn English. Children love listening to stories and storybooks present language in familiar and memorable contexts. We will be looking at vocabulary and describing characters, retelling these stories and eventually recreating our own.
  • Play communication games encouraging and motivating students to interact and communicate in a fun context.
  • Promote British life and culture by learning about and participating in activities on festivals and special days, food, music and daily life noticing the differences and similarities in our two cultures.
  • Exploit film, video and presentations in class to give our students understanding of authentic content, key to improving their language development and motivation.