Taipei Municipal SongShan High School of Commerce and Home Economics

Applied English Department’s White Paper on Education

Preface

Origins

    Cooperating with the government’s comprehensive high school plan since 2001(removal of three business management classes and one accounting class). Since then, our efforts have been going towards the improvement of our teachers, equipment, and teaching environment；thus students have achieved outstanding accomplishments on all fields.

  Comprehensive high school’s philosophy is split into three parts; freshmen year is to summarize, junior year is to differentiate, and senior year is to professionalize. This proved to be a disadvantage for the planning of student who study vocational courses, making it difficult for the development of featured courses. Also, comprehensive high school’s students’ program choice is unpredictable, thus affecting quality of teachers and the curriculum.

Course Adjustments

    According to the Educational Bureau’s case l NO. 10138141801 in Taipei city dated from September 14^th, 2012, comprehensive high schools can be disassembled starting 2013. And case NO. 10144272300 from Taipei city gave the approval for the formation of two applied English classes starting 2013.

      With the aim of meeting vocational education and public demands, we provide an environment for cultivating professional English ability in students, that is one of the main directions for the development of our school.  For many years, the public has had a biased view of vocational schools, mainly their lack of professional skills and humanism qualities. Also, vocational school’s students’ English ability is far behind that of high school students. Hence, to meet the demands of international workplace, the school’s applied English’s educational goals and curriculum development goals set out to equip students with good command of English communication skills, a correct worldview, increase students’ college-enrollment rate, and employment competitiveness.

 Educational Goal

Vocational School Educational Goals

       The goal of a vocational school is to teach professional knowledge, cultivate professional ethics, create primary professional skill personnel, enhance higher learning ability, and facilitate career development. And to accomplish these goals, we need to mentor students in the following:

1. Enrich professional knowledge, cultivate basic ability for the workplace.
2. Foster professional ethics, create a friendly, responsible, and initiative workplace attitude.
3. Raise humanism and technological qualities, enrich contents of life, create ingenuity, and the ability to keep on with the changes of society.
4. Promote interest and ability in pursuing higher learning, in turn setting the foundation for life-long learning and career development.

Applied English’s Educational Goal

1. Grooming standard persons in business and tourism English.
2. Strengthen listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills to that required on the university and tech institute level.
3. Cultivate English communication skills, business application and computer abilities.
4. Bring up students’ worldview and knowledge of western culture and society.

Developmental Directions and Plans on a Whole     

1. Strengthen application of practical course and English abilities.
2. Combine related profession and industry field’s chance of exploration.
3. Raise ability in English and securing of related certificates.
4. Take care of both continued learning and employment needs.
5. Value both character and virtue education.

Work Goals

Improving English Ability

With a combination of resources, such as foreign teachers and E-learning, to create a lively, diverse, and effective English learning environment, as well as improving the basic foundations of English ability; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Before graduation, students are expected to achieve a GEPT intermediate level certificate or a TOEIC score above 600.

Promoting International Exchange

In order for students to be equipped with global competitiveness and international attainment, English trainings are set in English-speaking countries in the summer, learning beside exchange students, and so on. All of this are done in an effort to raise the practicality of English skills and knowledge and skill of cross-culture communications. Cultivate school communication across the world, widen international views, and enhance cultural education and worldview.

Teaching Strategy

Teaching

Encourage new teaching materials and methods.

1. Sign a cooperation agreement with colleges and collaborate with foreign teachers to aid students.
2. Allow cross-major electives.
3. Have internship opportunities to apply what’ve learned.
4. Have career-planning activities and seminars, provide counsel on aptitude discovery and analysis.

Activities

1. Summer English camp for freshmen.
2. Educational trips to English-speaking nations.
3. Western holidays celebration.
4. English competitions.
5. Student exchange and cultural exchange.
6. Related career visits.

English Exams

1. TOEIC
2. CEPC English
3. GEPT
4. In-school on-line English competence exams

Teacher Structure and Attainment

1. Encourage teachers to plan the curriculum, design teaching activities, diversify evaluations, and etc.
2.  Cooperate with technological university on profession between teachers.
3. Taking full advantage of the foreign teachers from technological universities to help with the school’s English teaching and activities.
4. Encourage teachers to develop in the professional community.

Hardware equipment

Multi-media Language Classroom

     Functions for multi-media classroom: Teaching, video playing, digital recording and playback, oral abilities examination, in-sync translation, topic debate, and self-learning function.

English corner

     Designed to be an all-English immersive learning environment. In the English Corner, students have access to a wide array of English magazines, books, and papers, common English phrases, and interact with foreign teachers and exchange students, improve students’ English reading and speaking ability, as well as hold English-themed activities from time to time.

Group Professional Classroom

     Go through group discussion and cooperative learning as well as training students in oral expression abilities in presentation class with multi-media interactive screens, projector, and group discussion tables and equipment.