Was the 2013 O level Chinese Written Paper (June) difficult?(2014 New Syllabus)

For my students, especially those who are from top classes in their schools, they were full of grievances and disappointment upon leaving the exam hall.

 "Why was it so difficult? I thought that it was supposed to be easier!"

"I had no idea what the comprehension passage was talking about!"

"The MCQ options were all very close!"

"The words that they give for the close passage, I haven't seen them before!"

Such were the reactions of the students after they took the "the killer" exam. Even for those students who normally score A1 for their school exams shared the same pessimism! I was still in doubt so I handed the question paper to my son who was a Higher Chinese student that scored A1 for Chinese. He too agreed the paper was hard with some words from the close passage that were beyond his understanding. He felt that the standard of comprehension resembles that of a typical Higher Chinese paper rather than that of Chinese.

So in all, was the change in syllabus for 2014 going to be easy or difficult? Next year, with the revamp of  Sec 4 textbooks in addition to the 6 new textbooks (A and B) from Sec 1 to 3, students will need to grasp more words on their fingertips. Components that were formerly scrapped like 造句，填写汉字，填写词语 are back again, occupying 40% to 50% of paper 2. How are the students who are not inclined to memorizing going to cope? With the other "non-textbook" components weak, how are they going to score? In the past few years, I have seen some of the rather strong students failing to get an A1 despite working very hard. How are students going to do that now with the odds against them?

2013 O level Chinese Written Paper (June) Questions

Hot topics for Chinese O level Paper 1 (报章报道）

1报章报道： 国家环境局指定多座的熟食中心设立碗盘回收处，鼓励人们积极自觉归还碗盘。

2反映地铁不时发生故障并提出建议

3报章报道：教育部不公布全国状元和优秀名单

4成绩优异就是好学生?

5报章报道：政府考虑在早晨繁忙时段前，让公众免费乘搭地铁。

6你发现新移民面临生活上的问题，甚至与邻居发生误会。

7你常去的一间小贩中心的卫生情况越來越差，给食客带来了很多不便。

8报章报道：越來越多人鲁莽开车，导致意外伤忙的车祸有増加的趋势。

9本地学生只注重成绩，却忽略了品德教育。你同意吗?

10报章报道：组屋居民强烈反对在组屋楼下建乐龄活动中心或残障人士中心。

11在公共场所，人们应该怎么表现优雅行为?

12报章报道：越过50%的新加坡人面对极大的工作压力，不仅无法排除压力，甚至把不良情绪带给家人和朋友。

13你发现你居住的组屋区不断发生有人蓄意破坏公共设施，其中还包括涂鸦，给居民带来许多不便与烦恼。

14报章报道：保健促进局推出＂健康小贩计划＂和＂健康咖啡店计划＂，以普及与提高公众的健康意识。

15报章报道：教育部将颁发教育储蓄品德奖。试针对这则新闻，发表你的看法。

16有人认为，在教育学生方面，表扬胜于批评。你同意吗?

17网上购物的利与弊 

18谈谈科技的发展给人类带来的利与弊

19报章报道：乘客在巴士上起争执或打架，并惊动警方到场调解的事件日趋增加。

20如何正确使用社交网站

Who is suited for this type of tuition?

1) Sec 4 Express students:
They should ideally pass their Sec 3 end-of-year or SA2 exam. The intensive lessons are aimed to impart techniques to help them cope with the language. The techniques include Oral, Comprehension, composition and cloze passage.  These will at least help them attain a one-grade or two-grade improvement in May this year. The best is that if they scored a C6 last year, then they could aim towards a B3, if they were to score a B3 last year, the A1 should be targeted. All these goals will be towards the Nov paper.

2)PSLE students:
They should at least had a B for their SA2 last year in order for me to safely say I could help them to achieve at least an A/High A. Last year I was more focused on helping those v weaker students who frequently fail in their normal exams or had an extremely weak language foundation (couldn't speak proper mandarin). I thus could only help them with a one-grade improvement. Thus this year I hope that at least a handful of my students can begin with a moderately strong foundation.

3)Sec1-3 students:
Even if they fail their normal examinations, the situation is not as bleak as those mentioned above. They should have at least 1 year or 1 year plus to beef up their standard. Usually the common problems faced by students in passing Chinese include a limited word bank (not that they didn't learn enough words but more of retaining them in memory), inability to read or write or to recognise the meaning of the words. Thus when this repeats itself, the students get demoralised after numerous failed attempts and want to give up.

The root cause could be due to PSLE Chinese being an exam that emphasises too much on  memorising, rote listening and writing (Picture composition) without being taught practical methods. Rote learning would only result in "rote forgetting". Failing in composition, comprehension and cloze passage are the results of this. Therefore, techniques are more sustainable in that sense. Through learning simple "news" vocabulary, constructing sentences, writing short paragraphs and with the aid of multimedia and devices like e-dictionary, they will be able to make improvements. With visible improvements, their interest will slowly pick up. This will progress to the student setting goals for his or her O level Chinese in the long-run. With such motivation, he or she definitely has a high chance to succeed. Pls click my previous posts on students' testimonials for examples.

4)P5 students:
Even when faced with the problem of a weak foundation, if you have seen the testimonials of my previous foreign students, you will be surprised that they can make tremendous improvement! If a foreign student who did not grow up learning Chinese can do it, what more can normal students like your child do? It all boils down to effort and time. If the student is willing to give it their very best, I as a tutor will  commit to all means to raise her marks up. But of course Chinese being a language subject, we have to be realistic that vast improvement cannot be done overnight.
Here's how a typical primary school kid views Chinese, especially boys:
Just the day before Spelling or "听写", they are able to recall how to write the words but the day after they would have forgotten completely what are the characters they have learnt. With a short concentration span, they are easily distracted by trivial things during lessons. Their only goal in Chinese? To do well enough to satisfy you parents so that you can reward them. They fear 作业，they dread 听写. Their words are illegible! Sounds familiar?
Well let me tell you that you need not satisfy with this status quo! Constant encouragement from parents and teachers is key to turning the situation around. I feel only with a good teacher-student relationship, can the student's interest towards Chinese be unlocked. So let me help you, give me a call on my hp no. at 97641616 to start the change!

P6 Intensive Tuition

*Highlight P6 syllabus & Exam techniques

*Lessons on 6A textbook (emphasis on important vocabulary words)

*Teaching of composition through computer usage

*Oral Techniques through webcam and videos

Objective of Holiday Intensive Program: To create an awareness of the rigorous P6 syllabus to prepare for PSLE. This will cause the students to be more alert when school reopen. Starting early in preparation will mean allowing students to set their individual targets for Chinese. After the whole program, each student will be briefed on their present linguistic level of Chinese and how far are they from the targets.

O level Preparation

-Cover Exam Syllabus (sec 1 to 3) 

-Newspaper readings and further research on omy website: http://www.omy.sg/- a news portal website likened to stomp that has videos, pictures to supplement important news reports.

-Lessons drawn: how to get the main gist from huge chunks of texts, selecting good phrases for composition or "default" news phrases for the purpose of cloze passage. How to pronounce and articulate difficult words in preparation for oral exam.

-Oral, Compre and Compo techniques

Ryan who got an A for PSLE Chinese has worked hard to achieve his remarkable T-score. Indeed, this is another testimony that sheer hard work is able to overcome shortcomings for Chinese language. As introduced in my earlier posts, Ryan is a rather soft-spoken boy who comes from a English-speaking family. When he came in to sign up for tuition in June, I originally thought that there is too short a time to teach to raise his score and if i would succeed, it will only be to 65. But Ryan prove to be a different student. He is obedient, diligient and motivated. Although he also has his playful side sometimes, when you tell him to get back to work he will do as so. He improved from 50 to 65 during prelims before securing the A. Oral component is especially challenging for him who speaks Chinese with a weird intonation. But he overcame the odds by doggedly doing what I say. Everyday he will read some passages and record his voice so as to detect his mispronunciations. By practicing numerous times upon his mistakes, he was definitely confident during the day of the oral exam which gave his grade a push towards A.

Qian Xi, a studious girl, was searching for a right tuition to help her fill her missing gap in Chinese. She enrolled in one of the commercial composition classes but found out that the dry lessons did not aid in her improvement. She joined also in the period of june and in the last three months leading to her PSLE exam she opted for 1-to-1 individual tuition to enhance the effectiveness.She saw her fruits of labour early during the prelims where she scored 74 marks before proceeding to grab an A. She also has a very positive learning attitude motivated by the fact that she has already decided which school to go. She expects a lot from herself and thus it is this attitude that produces this good result.

Giacomo (Zhi Ming) is a half-Italian studentComposition, her weakest component became better due to continuous effort to commit important,appealing phrases to memory. During the crucial few weeks before exam, i added extra lessons up to 4  per week. He did not lament of tiredness. He persisted on. For Zhi Ming, comprehension and listening comprehension are huge challenges. He is a diligent boy but he is not as hardworking as Ryan and Qian Xi. What i meant by that is that he does he is hardworking to do the intensive bare minimum but has not reached such hunger for success to go the extra mile and practice on his own. he has the potential to score A but has not really breakthrough because of his weak foundation in the language.

For this year's batch of PSLE students, those who achieved A despite joining the tuition at a later time, have high self-expectations which drive them to work extremely hard. They are the one who are willing to carry out daunting yet important preparation work such as going for extra lessons, memorising good vocabulary words and practicing oral exam. The majority which got B are relatively as weak yet playful and not motivated. Although i can choose to give up on them whenever they crossed the line and takes learning lightly, I have the obligation to continue teaching them even if it means knowing they are not going to score well. If i did not continue teaching, they will give up on themselves and Chinese have gotten worse. Don't I feel disappointed that so many are getting B? Well, definitely but fortunately i take comfort in that almost all the parents are actually quite satisfied with their child's chinese grade. for the weak students, they were expecting that they might even fail Chinese. For these students, it is time to re-build their foundation to prevent history from repeating itself in secondary school.

2012 PSLE Oral

PSLE Oral exam:

 PSLE Oral exam:

PSLE 2012 Composition

Helping words:
水沟                                       指着                                    大布袋
漂浮                                       水流得急                           大声喊救

General Description: One rainy day,there were two students sharing an umberalla and they came across a canal.The canal was flooded with the ferocious rain and from a distance, a crowd has gathered and they were pointing at a particular big black bag floating along. In no time, the two boys jumped in and tried to reach for it but they struggled and appeared to be drowning.

Ryan
Balestier Hill Pri Sch

He joined my tuition class from July. Equipped with only two months of preparation, he has to face the PSLE Oral exam in August. Personally i find him a child who is obedient and studious but with low confidence and thus he has problems even speaking fluently. Furthermore, he does not come from a mandarin speaking background and has problem speaking out simple sentences.I know i had to drill him real hard to enable him to take the oral in august with optimum confidence.
  Ryan: Mr Kok uses voice recording which other tutors never use before. This method helps me to recognise my weakness. For example, some chinese words or phrases i might pronounce them wrongly but when i listen to them through recording, I will know where have i read wrongly. Through teachers' help and many more practices, I can slowly correct my mistakes and speak better.

Is P6 Easy?

This year i am faced with a daunting task of teaching a bunch of "challenging" kids. First of all they were scoring 35-55 marks for their normal examinations. However, they made a tremendous improvement in their SA1 and prelim Chinese exam with them scoring 50-74 marks. They are very weak in their mother tongue, proficient in English but almost illiterate in Chinese. They do not know how to speak and write simple words often needing to check on the e-dicitonary for every two to three words when writing compos. On top of that, their attitude will make you think teaching them is impossible. Unless the tutor is their family member or relative, nobody will have the patience to teach them.  All the bad habits you name it-Not doing any homework, not paying attention to you, distracting other students, playing computer games during lessons. To sum it up they are hyperactive, unable to keep still and listen. They will move about to distract other students making learning inconducive. It came to a point that even the last lesson before their PSLE exam, they still bother if they are able to play computer games if they do their work. 

Originally, i do not have much confidence in teaching them well. But being in a desperate situation, i accepted their behaviour and approached teaching with a different set of methods. Firstly i take an effort to talk to them and build relationships with each student. Through rewarding them snacks and adequate breaks i try to win their favour in order for them to listen to what i say. 

1)Knowing that their concentration span is relatively shorter than the average student, i emphasise the usage of laptops during class as a means to capture their attention. 

2)When teaching a new chapter of the "ke ben", i will maximise the use of iflashbook (MOE recommended software) to teach them  the new words or chi yu and how to read the text. When preparing for oral exams, i will use webcam and voice-recording softwares to effectively correct their mistakes in pronunciation and articulation in a yet interesting way. This will aid in their reading-the-passage, picture description and conversation components. Conventionally, teachers uses newspapers to teach students of news events.

3)But i rely on omy.com.sg news portal to allow them to learn the phrases commonly used in news events so as to expose them to the news report-style of cloze passages. Omy is a mandarin new portal where it has unique functions such as voice reading of the news article and with interactive videos and picture montouchs, the interest is kept alive. Composition wise, using news articles to impart vocabulary will give them confidence to write 150-280 word essays in the long-run, not forgetting comprehending skills when doing comprehension. 

4) Allowing students to type out their essays rather than writing it out will reduce their difficulty in writing essays.

Normally during holidays, only with 12 to 20 lessons in total can the student fully grasp the basic skills required to undertake a national examination. Upon 3 weeks of returning to school, this can change the attitude of the students and speed up the progress of your child's Chinese language if they were to apply my techniques. With improvement shown in the school examinations such as SA1 and Prelims, your child will then have greater confidence to take the PSLE. This is similar to what happened to the four boys i taught this year. They made a tremendous improvement in their SA1 and prelim Chinese exam with them scoring 50- 74 marks. Hopefully they had brought this confidence to the examination hall to earn the A or A* they were aiming for.

Sec 1/ Chinese preparation course start next week, (19 Nov)

Sec 2-3/

Sec 4 O lvl preparation is already underway

Q: Which schools do the majority of your students come ?
A: Schools offering International Baccalaureate (IB) programme like ACS (I), SOTA, SST, SJI.
Schools offering Integrated Programme (IP) like Raffles Inst., SCGS, RGS, MGS, Victoria School, Hwa Chong Inst., Nat. JC and other schools: Cedar Girls Sec, Cresent Girls Sec, TKGS, St. Patrick Sec, Fairfield Methodist Sec.


Q: What is the main challenge that Secondary school students face in doing well for Chinese?
A: The two main papers 1 and 2 form the bulk of obstacles separating students from their desired A1, A2 grades.
Paper 2: Time management is also an issue for weak students under paper 2. They often spend too much time on the front sections such as cloze passages and Comprehension (MCQs), leaving insufficient time for comprehension open-ended which holds the bulk of marks. Weak students also tend to have problem constructing sentences to highlight the points to answer the questions. They could only rely on copying huge chunks of text from the passage which wastes time.

Paper 1: Students tend to spend too much time in Situational writing and are left with too little time to complete the composition component. One important point to note is that Situational Writing component forms 20 marks while composition forms 40 marks out of the total 60marks. Thus students should be aware that the time spent on the components must correspond to the mark weightage.

Another problem is the failure to highlight the main points in the newspaper article review. Students often side track and talk about reasons that are not relevant to the issue. It is hence inevitable that students get penalized for this error.

 Students lack critical thinking skills to manage questions that involve free response. Comprehension texts from day one have been about the topics of moral values and even philosophical thoughts. For example, the value of giving and receiving, paternal and maternal love, optimism and pessimism. Students are required to mention their life examples when answering the free-response questions. Thus in my classes i would find passages belonging to this category for students to practice speaking it out and writing it out.


Q: Since PSLE is over for current P6 students, what is there to learn if they enrol in tuition?


A: They can sign up for headstart bridging lessons to give themselves an edge when they go on to secondary 1 next year. Secondary education is definitely different from primary school and Chinese is no exception. I see many Sec 1 students often struggle to maintain their previous results after being too used to primary school elementary Chinese.This is especially so for students planning to take Higher chinese.

In secondary school, composition is being tested at a higher level. No longer are the days where your child can look at the pictures and derive a story with the aid of helping words. They will now write more expository and even informative texts . Because to write a narrative in secondary school, you got to have a vivid vocabulary in order to pass. Local students often lack the ability to do so when being compared to their China counterparts The essay word length have to be increased also to 500 to 800 words for higher Chinese and a minimum word count of 300 words for Chinese. Such an increase in word length, gives rise to the challenge of lengthening their essays.

Next, for the main paper there are a total of 5 comprehension passages. No longer there is any graphic stimulus,replace-the-correct word and complete-the-sentence MCQs. Students have to possess good comprehending skills. The oral component is also no exception with conversation section that requires students to think on their feet to discuss issues of current affairs relevance. The shift to newspaper article reviews will need students to grasp general knowledge of current affairs in Chinese. Thus through newspapers and multimedia platforms such as omy.com, i will aim to nurture an interest in your child for current affairs. During this long break, allow your child to spend his time fruitfully to prepare early for his next stage of education. With lessons aimed to bring fun in learning Chinese thru video games and multimedia, it is definitely the best of both worlds!

2012 O level Hot Topics for composition/email-from Top Schools

2012年‘O’level 热门作文/私人/公务电邮

1. 新移民令国人不满
2. 越来越多学生参加海外CIP
3.  地铁屡次发生故障，使搭客极度愤满
4. 全国状元榜都是外国优秀生
5. 街头党砍人
6. 青少年当大耳窿跑腿
7. 青少年太依赖女佣
8. 精英犯罪
9.  政府展开全民运动
10. 地铁让位
11. 地铁车厢里饮食
12. 使用平板电脑(Ipad)/电子书的利弊
13. 咖啡店肮脏到恶心的地步                 
14. 抛弃，虐待宠物  
15. 学生讲脏话
16. 家人在赌场沉迷于赌博，该怎么办？
17. 青少年缺少睡眠
18. 学生在假期打工引起争议
19. 青少年在面对挫折时，不知如何应付。
20. 未成年吸烟者不断增加 

                

Sec 4 St. Patrick's and P6 ACS(J) testimonial

                                     

        

Why P6 Yuan Zhen can speak so confidently