Senior Secondary (S4 – S6)

The purpose of our Senior Secondary Program is to prepare our students to tackle the university entrance exams (such as HKDSE and IELTS) and beyond. We aim higher to prepare students to attend local and overseas universities and to comprehend the tertiary-level textbooks. Once familiarized with the academic language to work on topic-specific writing tasks, students will practice Critical Questioning and Thinking to help generating ideas and contents, and to elaborate their arguments at a more sophisticated level.  Senior secondary students, like students at all levels, will continue to work on improving on their reasoning and logic, proofreading, and reading and presentation skills to prepare themselves for university. The focus is always on applying the English literacy skills acquired in classes.

Grammar

Advanced grammar continues to be central at the senior secondary level, and the focus will be catered to applications where grammatical forms are often mixed. Sentence analysis is also a routine practice to help students familiarize themselves with mixed grammar usage in the real world, and successfully blend grammar and style in their writing. We will also take aim at common grammatical errors, such as dangling modifiers, misplaced modifiers, faulty parallelism, fused sentences, and vague pronouns.

Writing and Logical Reasoning

All essays at the Senior Secondary level will be required to conform to the thesis-support structure—a structure in which the student must locate the main claim in the introduction, and follow with strong evidence and detailed analysis in support of this claim in the body of an essay. That is crucial for excelling at university entrance exams. We will teach techniques to avoid writing an academic thesis that falls flat intellectually, and to build extended arguments. They will learn to avoid a variety of logical fallacies in their writing. Besides, students will be taught to construct cohesive and coherent essays.  The types of writing assignments they can expect to master include the analytical essay, book review, critical review, position paper, comparative essay, analysis of charts and graphs, creative writing, personal reflection, and the essential personal statement for university entrance. Students are taught critical thinking skills: analysis, comparison, evaluation, argumentation, interpretation, and reflection.   Essential at this stage is to learn to read their own work with dispassionate criticism and to acquire advanced varying sentence techniques.   

Reading Comprehension and Oral Presentation

Improving on reading skills—locating the main ideas, understanding the text on both the literal and metaphorical levels, building vocabulary from context clues—continues to be an essential part of English literacy acquisition at this level.  Students will be introduced to a wide range of news and articles from The New York Times, The Economist, and The Global and Mail, and will present an academic thesis before a small, encouraging group of students to become more comfortable with giving speeches and oral presentations.