Third language is a topic that has been referenced multiple times in my earlier posts - it is a choice that lucky and privileged secondary school students in Singapore have the right to exercise, and choosing a third language is always one of the greatest difficulties we face.
Recently, to combat the lack of information provided for us to make our choice regarding which third language to take, Polyglot Club SG has organised and held a Third Language Webinar for Primary 6 Students - Making Your Choice! We had the honour of hosting more than 200 participants with signup numbers hitting 300. In the following entry, we will briefly describe the events that happened during the webinar.
The webinar started off with our founder and chairperson, Loy Xing-Yi, giving the keynote and plenary speech. It covered the technical aspects of language learning, such as the CEFR framework and lexical similarity. Details like the benefits of learning a third language and what to take into consideration while learning a third language were also covered.
Following that, our chairperson proceeded to give a speech on Japanese as a third language, having learnt Japanese for 11 years and counting although she is not an MOELC student in the Japanese language. Several further aspects to consider, such as location and accessibility of MOELC, transport to and from MOELC and the food and drink options available in and around MOELC were also talked about. The information had been collected based on past years, although the MOELC location of each school’s students may differ with each passing year.
A Question and Answer (Q&A) session was also conducted after the first Japanese talk, which included many enthusiastic questions raised about the timing and workload of third language lessons. Third language lessons only require 45 minutes of online work at the students’ own time outside of the 3 hour 15 minute weekly lessons conducted at MOELC.
Two sessions of breakout rooms were also conducted, in which invited speakers shared their experiences regarding learning a third language. The other three foreign languages were spoken about in more detail - French, German and Spanish. Here, we would like to thank the invited speakers for lending us their time: Sophie Chong Ying Shan, Lorraine Chan and Arshia Mahajan.
To wrap up the whole affair, there was a short debrief regarding the resources you can find on our blog (here) and tips for learning new languages which might not have been offered in MOELC.
Thank you and have a nice day! We look forward to many more years of hosting this webinar.