Twinkle Stars Mandarin Centre

Chinese students don’t lack vocabulary—they’re missing the key to high-scoring compositions!


This year, I was once again invited to teach a PSLE Composition Holiday Programme for Primary 5 and Primary 6 students at a local government primary school.

Interestingly, last year I taught the regular classes, while this year I was assigned to the Gifted Chinese Programme (Higher Chinese) classes. Another teacher who taught the Higher Chinese classes last year is now teaching the regular classes. The difference between the two groups is quite noticeable.

The first thing I observed was classroom discipline. The Higher Chinese students were incredibly focused and self-disciplined. Despite my fast-paced and high-expectation teaching style, the entire class stayed engaged and completed a full composition within 50 minutes.

The goal of this programme is not routine classroom teaching, but helping students make meaningful improvements before the PSLE. I shared my teaching approach with the teacher in charge, explaining that I hoped to help the students push their writing to the next level. After observing my lesson, both the supervising teacher and the programme coordinator gave very positive feedback, commenting that the lesson was detailed, practical, and highly beneficial for the students.

After marking all of their compositions, I noticed a very interesting pattern.

Most Higher Chinese students already have a strong vocabulary and can express their ideas fluently. They are not short of ideas or language.

However, their biggest challenges are:

* unclear overall structure,
* weak paragraph organisation,
* poor balance between detailed and brief descriptions,
* and a lack of clear thematic focus throughout the composition.

In other words, they can write, but they have not yet mastered how to organise their ideas and language into a high-scoring composition.

This is actually encouraging.

Compared with building vocabulary—which takes years—developing structural awareness and composition skills can improve much more quickly with the right guidance. Once students understand the techniques, many can improve by 3–5 marks or even more within a relatively short period.

In our next lesson, I will focus specifically on these areas. I hope their second compositions will show a genuine leap in quality.

As a teacher, nothing is more rewarding than identifying where students are struggling and helping them find the breakthrough that allows them to reach their full potential.

🌟 PSLE Chinese Oral Mock Exam Update: Strong Foundations, High-Potential Results!

Today, our students completed a full PSLE Chinese Oral Mock Examination conducted under actual exam conditions. Each student received detailed feedback on every question, helping them identify both their strengths and areas for improvement.

Overall, the results were very encouraging.

📖 Reading Aloud (20 marks)
Most students scored between 19–20 marks, demonstrating excellent pronunciation, fluency, appropriate pacing, and natural expression. Many were able to adjust their tone according to the passage and read confidently with clarity.

🎥 Stimulus-Based Conversation (30 marks)
Most students achieved 24–27 marks, showing good understanding of the topic and the ability to respond appropriately with relevant examples.

As a result, most students attained an overall score of 43–47 marks out of 50. It is important to note that these scores were awarded using a deliberately strict marking standard to identify weaknesses early and prepare students more effectively for the actual examination.

What Students Did Well

✅ Clear and organized responses with a logical structure.
✅ Generally fluent communication and relevant answers.
✅ Ability to support ideas with examples.
✅ Good understanding of the video stimulus and question requirements.

Areas for Further Improvement

🔹 Some students have good structure but need more depth and development of ideas.
🔹 Others have plenty of ideas but need to learn how to express them more concisely and effectively.
🔹 Greater use of advanced vocabulary and stronger sentence structures is needed.
🔹 More practice is required to improve confidence and smooth transitions between points.
🔹 Students should learn to extend their answers beyond personal experiences to include perspectives from family, school, community, and society.

Our Focus Moving Forward

📌 Strengthening content quality and idea development.
📌 Building students’ oral vocabulary bank through regular practice.
📌 Conducting two more full mock examinations before the Prelim and PSLE Oral Examination.

With consistent practice, stronger content preparation, and increased confidence, we are confident that our students will continue to improve and perform at their best in both the July Prelim Oral Examination and the August PSLE Oral Examination.

Well done to all students for your hard work and effort! Keep pushing forward—we are on the right track. 🌟📚💪

From a school booth → to an O-Level writing breakthrough

The next day, I brought this real-life experience straight into my O-Level Chinese class.

The task:
Plan a fun and meaningful sharing session

Most students struggle here because:
❌ Their ideas are too generic
❌ They don’t know how to expand
❌ They lack clear, concrete examples

So instead of explaining more, I showed them real visuals from the booth.

We broke it down together:
✔ Display → clarity
✔ Interaction → engagement
✔ Rewards → motivation

That’s when things clicked.

They could finally SEE what “engaging” and “meaningful” actually look like.

With structure + real content,
they didn’t just complete the task —
they understood how to approach similar questions moving forward.

This is what effective learning looks like:
Not memorising — but understanding.

I currently run small-group O-Level Chinese writing classes, focusing on helping students:
✔ Generate ideas
✔ Write with clarity
✔ Expand answers effectively

DM me if you’d like to find out more.