Teaching Chinese at St George's School
About the school
St. George’s School for Girls, an independent school in Edinburgh, introduced the teaching and learning of Chinese ten years ago, to give the opportunity to:
native speakers of Chinese, mostly boarders, to take examinations up to university entrance level. This meant preparing them for Advanced Level in Chinese, as Chinese did not form part of the Scottish suite of qualifications.
Scottish students to acquire skills in a new and clearly extremely important language. To achieve this, staff worked with the Scottish Qualifications Authority to develop unit assessments in Chinese at Access 3 and Intermediate 1 and 2 Levels. They were awarded an SQA Curriculum Award for this work.
Headteacher Dr Judith McClure adds: ‘We believed that our all our students should acquire basic skills of communication in Chinese and that they should all have the opportunity to study it to university entrance level if they wished. We were encouraged by the public statements in support of Scottish links with China made by the First Minister and the Scottish Executive (now the Scottish Government) and by the support of the British Council Scotland.’
Appointments
Initially, there was no teacher of Chinese on the permanent staff of the school, but each year, a teacher from China was employed through the GAP scheme.
In 2005, St. George’s decided to introduce the teaching and learning of Chinese into the curriculum at primary and secondary level, and to appoint a permanent member of staff to ensure continuity and progression. In session 2005-2006, they appointed a teacher of Chinese, Melany-Lu Lin, to the permanent staff, and employed two teachers of Chinese for the session through the British Council scheme.
Numbers of pupils
Chinese is increasing in popularity every year at St. George's School. This session, 209 pupils from Primary 4 to S6 are learning Chinese as part of the curriculum, the majority of which are non-native speakers. There are 11 native speakers learning Chinese as an Advanced Level course.
In addition, the school offers Chinese clubs as part of the Xtra Programme for pupils in P3, P7 and S1.