As the Foreign Languages Group, our aim is to prepare students for the globalizing world, improve their perspectives on life, and enable them to use their foreign language reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills at a good level. Additionally, we aim for each of them to be individuals that can apply their foreign language knowledge to real life, share what they know with others, are self-confident, and have enhanced interpretation and strong communication skills.
Adopting and upholding the principles of academic integrity, we reinforce our goal with courses requiring critical thinking, research and its presentation, product creation using imagination, and detailed analysis of literary texts and works.
English curriculum has been integrated with the foreign language objectives established by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. An annual course plan has been created in consideration of the program’s “learner autonomy” approach. Besides academic writing and presentation, performance homework, text and film analysis, and blogging tasks, we have activities where our students can generate and present their own ideas and projects within the scope of the courses. We attach importance to group and pair work during in- and out-of-class activities.
English lessons complement each other with interdisciplinary course planning involving up-to-date and different themes and topics. Reading component includes analysis, synthesis and evaluation of original stories. Drama is implemented according to the concepts in our curriculum with Story Telling, Task Based Learning, Role Play, and Critical Thinking and Cooperative Learning. Being an English-only area with English classes, study rooms, research room, media room, and a library with English books, the “English Zone” provides a natural environment for our students to speak English.
To measure and keep track of our students’ language competence according to international standards, we have 2 annual FCE practice exams for 9th graders, 2 annual IELTS practice exams for 10th graders, and 2 annual IELTS practice exams and an official IELTS exam at the end of the academic year for 11th graders. We thus support our students to shape their futures by documenting their language levels as C1, which is the target of our Group for our students by the end of 11th grade.
English is the first foreign language and lessons are divided into two as Integrated Skills and Core Skills. German is taught as the second foreign language.
Our group organizes the DŞMUN (Darüşşafaka Model United Nations) conference in mid-October every year and welcomes students from different schools at Darüşşafaka Schools. Our students participate in ESU (English-Speaking Union) debates, national and international MUN conferences, English quiz and writing competitions, and German reading competitions. Other than these, students take part in “Summer Course”, “SKYPE PAL” where presentations are shared over the internet within the scope of the sister school project with Marlborough College from the UK, and another activity where presentations are shared within the scope of the sister school project with Zjecar School from Serbia. Furthermore, every year, one of our students studies at our sister school in Germany for one academic year as part of the exchange program within the scope of the sister school project.
As the Foreign Language Group, we facilitate MUN&ESU and Cinema Club skill workshops.
