Education | DSEJ to implement bilingual classes in official schools

The Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) will create bilingual classes to combine Chinese – and Portuguese – language material.

The revamp aims to “give priority to the training of bilingual talents for the government” under the development strategy “One Center, One Platform,” and comes in response to the high demand for professionals with bilingual skills.  The new scheme will take effect during the academic year of 2017 and 2018 for two official schools – Flora Primary School and Zheng Guanying.

DSEJ hopes that the scheme will better prepare students to pursue their studies locally or abroad in higher education courses where fluency in Chinese and Portuguese are required, such as law, translation and interpretation, foreign relations, public administration and commerce, among others.

For the coming academic year, DSEJ will introduce bilingual classes in the first year of primary and secondary (Form 1) education at the Zheng Guanying Official School, and in the first year of primary education at the Luso-Chinese Primary School of Flora. It is expected that the program will be progressively expanded to include other year levels in the future.

According to DSEJ, these bilingual classes “will be able to break with traditional teaching methodology, adopting a flexible curriculum and pedagogic design, with Mandarin and Portuguese vehicular languages.”

In addition, schools will provide special curriculums and other supplementary measures for beginner Portuguese language learners who enroll in the bilingual classes in the first year of secondary education, taking note of their existing Portuguese language knowledge. RM

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