High School Modern Languages

Here is an interesting article about handwriting on The Wall Street Journal. It used to be much bigger part of schooling. Reserch shows that there is a connection between handwriting and brain development.

Students have handwriting trainging on characters in Asian language in Modern Language classes. After the push to digital materials, perhaps it is time to go back to analog  a little bit. All in all, it is always important to maintain good ballance!

Author of “The Language Instinct” talks about how language and thoughts are related on TED TALK. How amazing!!!!

Steven Pinker on Language and Thought

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_on_language_and_thought.html

Subtitle is available in Chinese, Korean, French Spanish and more. (Sorry, no Japanese…)

I hope everyone is refreshed and well-spiritted for the new school year! HS Open House is amongst us now and we are very excited to see parents in our classrooms.

Here are our teachers and courses. Please feel free to contact them if you wish to discuss about your child’s learning in our department. We hope to meet you on Tuesday 31st August for HS Open House.

Chinese: Mrs Ji Hua (Chinese 2, 3, IB BS1, IB BS2), Mrs Claire Fan (Chinese 1, 4)

Filipino: Ms Kris Saulo (Filipino 1, 4), Sir Rey Candido (Filipino 3, IB A2S1/H1, IB A2 S1/H2)

French: Ms Shellie Banks (French 2), Mr Patrick Westhoff (French 3, 4, IB ab-initio SL1/ IB ab-initio SL2), Mrs Michele Bailey (French 4, IB BS1/H1, IB BS2/H2)

Japanese: Mrs Naomi Mes (Japanese 1), Ms Misao Akashi (Japanese 2, 3, 4, IB BS1/S2, IB BH1/H2, IB A1 H1/H2)

Korean: Mrs Ji-Eun Lee (IB A1 H1. IB A1 H2)

Spanish: Mrs Shellie Banks (Spanish 1, 2), Mr Alex Pethan (Spanish 2, 3), Ms Maura Murphy (Spanish 3, IB B S2/H2), Ms Adriana Vargas (Spansih 4, IB B S1/H1)

We had Language Assembly BABEL10 this week. All foreign language classes participated to showcase their written and oral works. Students had a fun sharing and it was greatly appreciated by everyone who joined us.

Poster Competition winner – Filipino 3 Audrey MacCormac

It has been said that learning a new language is a good training for your brain. As we have may students who are bilingual or trilingual, this may be a very interesting research to the community.

This article discusses about how being a bilingual speaker benefits on brain. That’s why all ML teachers look young?!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/north_west/8452843.stm

In HS, we offer following languages and literature courses. Please see the link on right hand side for links for teachers of those classes.

Chinese 1, Chinese 2, Chinese 3, Chinese 4, IB Chinese B

Filipino 1, Filipino 2, Filipino 3, Filipino 4, IB Filipino A2

French 1, French 2, French 3, French 4, IB French B

Japanese 1, Japanese 2, Japanese 3, Japanese 4, IB Japanese B, IB Japanese A1 (HL only)

Korean A1 (HL only)

Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3, Spanish 4, IB Spanish B