| Overseas Study Tours |
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Every year, English Department will organize annual Overseas Study Tours in different English Speaking countries, with the aim of helping our students immerse into an English Speaking environment, and learn more about foreign history and culture. Getting students to experience local lifestyle is the focus of each trip. In the past few years, our students demonstrated great interest in communicating with foreign students ranging from Singapore, UK, Australia and even Germany. As a cultural exchange programme, students had the chance to visit local high schools, stay at host families, and even take adventure on rock climbing. In the year of 2013, 10 students were flown to Sydney and Canberra to take part in an eight-day Australian Excursion. As the first step of cultural immersion, they were required to stay in three different host families, taking every second to adapt to an unfamiliar environment. Fortunately, this sense of strangeness was soon melted by the enthusiasm and hospitality shown by the hosts. During their stay, the host parents prepared mouthwatering cuisine with deep fried sweet potatoes as starter, grilled lamb chops as main dish, and capsicum salad as desert. Dozens and dozens of colloquial snacks like Tim Tam, the renowned Australian chocolate bar and Vegemite, the locally exploited jam served with toast became one of our students’ best lovers! As return, students also seized every opportunity to exchange their culture with their “Aussie” hosts, teaching them how to use chopsticks, say “Hello” in Chinese…. You name it! On top of the family life, in day time students were led to different tourist spots to explore the local “must-see” in Australia. They were assigned various educational tasks like drawing the design of the Sydney Opera House, writing a diary about the landscape of Blue Mountains and interviewing an Australian citizen in the Parliament House, etc. Sweet photos taken in various backdrops portray the happy times students have been spending together. Effort spent on each tour always turns out to be worthwhile as it develops not only students’ spirit of teamwork and independence, but the inevitable needs to speak English that challenge students to step forward. English not long serves as a supplementary skill but rather a natural quality required to survive in the places they had been exposed to. All of these facilitate students’ English standard as well as broadening their horizon and sensitivity towards the outside world. 
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