Observational journal- Warrawong High School- Warrawong Intensive

English Centre
Leung Yuk Tin Yvette

In the third week of July, I visited the Warrawong Intensive English Centre (IEC), a
part of Warrawong High School that aims at providing English training to nonEnglish speaking migrants, refugees and temporary resident community aged from 13
to18 who arrive Australia with limited knowledge in English. The centre provides 4
terms of English training to students. From class 1 to 4, when students achieve the
standard within a term, they will be promoted to the next class. Upon the completion
of class 4, students will then apply for attending mainstream high schools to continue
their studies under the senior secondary Australian curriculum advised by the
government.
During the week of school visit, I was assigned to stay with class 4 students and
mainly observed and helped individual students with their classwork. It was a small
class with only 13 students, mainly Arabic speakers coming from Syria and Iran and
as they are all class 4 students having their last term at IEC, they share similarly fluent
proficiency in English. Concerning the classroom setting, the 13 students sat in a
shape of a square and no grouping was observed, though occasional pair work may be
done in class.
From what I observed in that week, the teacher did not focus a lot on differentiation:
she delivered same materials, assigned same tasks and allocated equal time to the
whole class. The fact that differentiation was rarely adopted in this class mainly
because of the small class size which allows the teacher to check students progress
frequently by walking around in class, clarifying conceptions and offering help
immediately when misunderstanding is observed to reduce the naturally-different
learning pace of students.
Having said that differentiation was rarely observed in this class, the teacher did
mention that differentiation such as withdrawal programme was more common when
they were juniors. The withdrawal programme- a during-school programme that pulls
out and supports individual students from class who are behind others. It supports
language learning from spelling, pronunciation to improving students literacy skills,
depending on teachers teaching progress and students needs.
On the other hand, the teacher also shared with me an effective within-class

Observational journal- Warrawong High School- Warrawong Intensive

English Centre
Leung Yuk Tin Yvette

differentiation she did to cater for diversity in class. In this differentiation task,
students will be divided into 4 groups and the grouping is based on their ability,
sometimes similar ability grouping or mixed ability grouping with the fast learners
helping the others in the group. Then, different groups of students will be assigned
different tasks with some on writing/ grammar, some on reading. Each group is
accompanied by a teacher or teaching assistant, except for independent tasks, and
after completing a task, the group will swap with each other to do another task (Please
see appendix for clear illustration). Owing to the similar proficiency of students in this
class, the teacher did not focus a lot on differentiation to cater for learners needs.
However, teacher did fully utilize various resources to accommodate learners diverse
learning styles apart from mere lecturing, instances such as playing movie trailers
online and doing self-directed research online.
Despite the fact that the situation in IEC is different from that of mainstream schools
in a sense that much more resources and supports are given to students to facilitate a
fast progress of language acquisition, the idea of peer tutoring and a good modelling
of a communicative-focused task-based learning approach are still enlightening
insights beneficial to my learning as an ESL teacher.
Appendix: Illustration of within-class differentiation

Observational journal- Warrawong High School- Warrawong Intensive

English Centre
Leung Yuk Tin Yvette

Abbreviation
T: Teacher
S: Student