PSLE ORAL last minute notes July 2017

PSLE Chinese new oral format is summaried as such "Students will be given 10 minutes to prepare – they will have to plan their time to review both the reading passage (on computer screen), and the video for oral within that time frame. Upon entering the exam room, they will then proceed to read the passage on screen, and watch the video once. Subsequently, the examiner will ask 3 guiding questions related to the theme in the video –

A question about the content of the video – what happened, what did you observe?

e.g. Tell me about an event relating to “helpfulness” that you have seen in the video.

The student’s thoughts/views/comments related to the theme, what did you learn?

e.g. What helpful deed have you done for your friend and what did you learn?

To share a similar/relevant experience, or to further extend the theme to society.

e.g. How do you think the school should encourage pupils to care for each other?"

Other then the guiding questions, students need to answer related questions as the examiners guide the students in answering those questions. Those extra questions are there to help examiners correctly assess the students ability.

The old format focuses more on locations and their related activities and students need to know names of common things, common activities and a lot of action words. (note: What Primary 1-3 has been teaching is very good for the old format.) Now the new format changed its focus: The content(topic) of the exam is very important now as your child need to know the topics by heart.

1) Keep our environments clean

2) Go Green, earth hour, recycling, reuse etc

3) Traffic safety

4) Healthy eating and living

5) Helping the needly, giving seats etc

6) Be independence like learn to cook, organizing school bags etc. https://zbschools.sg/

7) Values such as Responsibility, hardworking, Caring could be a topic too. Resources; A) There are several books with videos so that you can practice with your child, they are quite X tho. B) Get the apps for PSLE Chinese Oral Exam Guide (口试精编) it has some free video for practice. C) School often gives out Oral booklets from primary 4 to 6, if you collected them then they can be helpful. D) I personally find the guide book  '看录像说话' by '大拇指' is useful but you have to ask your child to use all the points and write down the scripts according for every page. Ready made answer scripts in the market are either not in depth or lack key points."Thumbs Up 拇指家族
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As for Oral Recitation, Please make sure your child read out loud one paragraph daily in Chinese as a practice.

Before their examinations, Ask them to read out the passages from PSLE booklet, PSLE oral books within 30 seconds to 45 seconds without any hesitation/stops at all. This is to train 通顺朗读能力 fluency.

(Yes its 250 words in 30-45 seconds.)

Just before exams, memorized the topical scripts for question 2 and 3.

Bring all oral notes and booklet to exam waiting room.

And lastly good luck and be polite.

PSLE guide 2 : Oral Examinations - Video Oral preparation

This is the second post to help your kid with their PSLE Chinese - Video oral section.
As we all know, The video segment not only introduces video, it's quite different from the previous PSLE Oral whereby picture description and some knowledge of a topic is enough to score. The New PSLE Chinese Oral introduces a new element called topical discussion (or 会话). For one who can answer to daily question and answer, it will be a very big challenge as you cannot be a good talker, you have to be a knowledgeable and sensible speaker.

Topic knowledge

I have seen some Schools with school based oral booklets and if you have that, good luck to your child as now you have to put in lots of topical knowledge into their brain.

3 methods to instill those knowledge into your child's brain:-

1) Reading aloud a page from the booklet daily, and you can do some explaination later. Read for at least 30 minutes.

2) Then ask your child to use what they had been reading to tell you about the topic. go into details if you must as its the details that scores. Even better ask them to tell you a story that relates to the topic.

3) Repeat step 1 and 2 daily for at least 30 minutes.

The speedy method is to get the apps I talked about in my previous posts and let your child listen to them everyday for at least 30 minutes. Then you listen to what your child has to talk about the topic everyday.

Research shows that when we communicate, we spend around 40-50% of our time listening, 25-30% speaking, 11-16% reading and only 9% writing (although that last one might have changed in recent years due to the rise in social media).

That means we spend about half the time listening!

http://www.fluentu.com/blog/the-importance-of-listening-in-language-learning/