Teacher Discussion Forums

Dear colleagues,

I am quite interested in how many lessons of English per week high school students in different countries have.

I know this teacher forum is visited by many teachers of many nationalities. Would you be so kind and write me how it is in your countries.

For example here in Slovakia, students who visit school called gymnasium /sometimes translated as grammar school, actually it is a kind of school which prepares students for university studies/ have only 3 lessons per week. They study 2 languages, both 3 lessons a week /a lesson takes 45 minutes/.

Im looking forward to your responses.

Luba

In general, we have 5 or 6 lessons per week in China. In my school, 5 lessons. But this year, we are in Junior3, so we have additive 2 lessons. I don't think it's enough because we have too much work to do before the final exam.

In Wisconsin, we have each class every school day. For someone taking a foreign language (English is the L1 for most here), that means 5 classes that are about 50 minutes long. Since the school I work at is so small, we don't have a seperate classroom for the Spanish speaking students, and they have to spend all day with an English speaking class. For them, then, it's 7 hours a day of learning everything in a language they don't know.

In Japan, I think most students have at least 3 lessons a week for one hour but most go to after school as well for private lessons which is often half and hour with a native English speaker and half an hour with a Japanese tutor for grammar. In Mongolia, in the public schools they had 3 lessons a week for 45 minutes. In the private school we had 5 lessons a week for 45 minutes for speaking with a native English teacher and 5 with a Mongolian English teacher for grammar. In Greenland the secondary students had 4 hours a week in grades 7 to 10 and 5 hours in grade 11 which is their last year. They are starting with lessons once a week from Grade 4 in most schools though.