Services

DSE support for schools

Are your students underperforming in DSE speaking and writing?

Asset 2
highly qualified English Teachers and Examiners

You partner with a team of DELTA and Masters-level teachers and examiners, dedicated to the success of your students.

Online
online and face-to-face

Our team works both online and face-to-face in Hong Kong, ensuring we can meet our clients’ needs.

English
Elevating english level

We quickly and effectively elevate your students English to university entrance standard.

Maximize their potential with Blue Water's expert DSE support!

All teachers and school leaders know that the main challenge in guiding students to high performance in DSE speaking and writing is to provide enough observed practice opportunities and effective, actionable feedback. Large classes make this almost impossible. Individual students or small groups miss out on critical individual feedback, advice and guidance that they so desperately need to improve their performance in the exam.
Either ask teachers to ‘do their best’ with too many students to make impacting grades almost impossible, or they can hire more staff. However, this comes with its own risks. Sufficiently qualified and experienced teachers are often hard to find, expensive and of inconsistent quality. Schools often pay too much for a mediocre service. The result is an annual cohort of students who could have done much better had they had the right support.
Blue Water Education Services provides vital supplementary DSE Support in English writing and speaking that gives schools what they need to resolve this dilemma and help their students achieve their full potential. We offer a variety of on-line programmes tailored to your students’ needs, delivered by qualified and experienced DSE specialists.
Our services complement and enhance the school curriculum, providing students with personalized guidance, feedback and practice that will boost both their confidence and performance. By using our established expertise and global network, we are able to keep our costs low and our quality high, ensuring schools get the best ROI and empower their students to achieve their full potential.

Speaking

Developing students’ DSE speaking skills requires frequent practice, careful observation and actionable feedback. However, in large classes teachers cannot provide enough support to individual students or small groups. Our speaking programmes are designed to overcome this challenge and help students improve their speaking performance efficiently and effectively.

DSE Speaking Workshops

Our high-quality additional DSE speaking workshops are designed to effectively improve DSE speaking scores. Our small group sessions (up to four students) provide ample opportunities for students to practice. More importantly, the low student to teacher ratio means that student’s performances are monitored in detail, offering each student thorough individualised feedback and actionable guidance for how they can improve. Through our small groups, our teachers can track each student’s progress over multiple sessions, allowing for targeted support to refine their speaking skills.

Read More

English Exposure and Fluency Programme

One of the main challenges for students who want to improve their English is the lack of authentic speaking opportunities. Our English Exposure and Fluency Programme, which was initially developed to enhance speaking performance for the IELTS assessment, can help students develop their speaking skills in ways that traditional classroom interaction cannot.

Our second language learning experts host brief sessions for small groups of students utilizing interaction patterns grounded in the latest research in second language acquisition. The objective is to foster interaction and eliminate obstacles to engagement, aiding students who are struggling to improve their English communicative competence. Lesson content and topics are thoughtfully constructed to pique interest and improve fluency and vocabulary in critical lexical areas.

This type of informal speaking practice is a valuable supplement to classroom work that can help students who are struggling to improve their level, as well as provide a more suitable environment for more advanced students to expand their speaking skills beyond the constraints of normal classroom interaction.
Read More

Writing

Raising DSE writing performance is challenging. To perform well in the writing assessment, students need to be aware of the examiners’ expectations, the exam is organisation, marking system and structure, and the suitable genre and language conventions for different text types. To develop these skills, students need frequent, detailed and actionable feedback on their writing. However, providing this support can be challenging. Although teachers know what students need to excel on the test, they often lack enough class time to cover everything they would like. More significantly, it is almost impossible for teachers to devote enough marking time to give each student the thorough and detailed written feedback they need to improve their writing. Blue Water can help schools close this gap by offering targeted services that enhance students’ writing development cost-effectively.

DSE Writing Feedback

The key to enhancing DSE writing skills is frequent and specific feedback that guides students to improve their work. Despite working long additional hours to mark students’ work and give them feedback, many teachers in Hong Kong still feel that they cannot provide enough individual attention to every writing assignment from their students.

Blue Water’s expert team of English language specialists, experienced teachers and examiners can offer essential support. Our team dedicate substantial time to each writing sample we receive and provide comprehensive and constructive written feedback and action plans for improvement. Our team track and support each student’s progress over extended periods, efficiently optimizing the development of their writing ability.

Read More
See Sample Report
Get written feedback

Supplementary DSE Genre Awareness Programme

Teachers have limited lesson time to prepare students for the writing assessment. They focus on essential knowledge, skills, techniques, and approaches, but often there is not sufficient lesson time to study the conventions and linguistic rules of different genres and text types. However, these are crucial for students who want to perform well on the test, especially those aiming for high scores.

Blue Water offers supplementary courses to schools that teach students essential awareness of these key text types and their linguistic features. Students will learn how to organise, structure and style their writing for various genres, such as articles, formal letters, argumentative and discursive essays, blog posts, etc. Our courses are flexible and tailored to each school’s needs.
Read More

DSE Speaking workshops

  • Favicon1 Options
Length: 30/40/45/60 minutes
Frequency: 1/2/3/4 sessions per student per week
Students per group: 2/3/4
Delivery: Online via zoom/google meet/teams
Teacher: DSE specialist teacher /DSE experienced NET / English language expert
  • Favicon1 Service description:
The teacher will guide the students through a mock DSE speaking assessment (Part 1). Guidance will be given depending on the learning goals for the session. Students will be encouraged to discuss and analyse their performance. They will be given advice and actionable feedback that they can bring into future sessions.
During the sessions, our teachers will be closely observing the students’ performance to pinpoint any concerns, challenges, and opportunities for enhancement. Our team will devise personalized learning maps for each student, ensuring their growth and advancement are managed efficiently, and they receive adequate support to foster their development and progress.
The wide range of expertise in our teaching team means that we can analyse students’ performance in a range of areas, dependant on your school’s needs. Sessions can be led by a single teacher, allowing for personalized attention to each student, or by a team for a broader range of knowledge to benefit the students.

English Exposure and Fluency programme

  • Favicon1 Options
Length: 30/40/45/60 minutes
Frequency: 1/2/3/4 sessions per student per week
Students per group: 2/3/4/5/6
Delivery: Online via zoom/google meet/teams
Teacher: experience teacher (Cantonese speaking) / experienced NET / English language expert
  • Favicon1 Service description:
Based on the latest research, our sessions follow expert plans created by our team of linguists and second language acquisition experts that cover important language skills comprehensively by focusing on key communication and vocabulary areas. Through these plans, students are encouraged to engage in a range of interactions and use the English language in diverse ways. By placing them in situations where communication is necessary, we help them overcome any emotional or psychological barriers that may hinder their progress. With different topics, language use, and interaction patterns, our plan ensures variety throughout each session.
Over the course of the programme, our team will closely monitor and pay careful attention to each student in order to enhance their English language use and fluency in the most efficient and effective way possible. Whether they are a student who needs support to achieve a basic level or a student striving for a score of five or above, we will tailor our approach to meet their individual needs.

DSE writing feedback

  • Favicon1 Options

Marker: DSE specialist teacher /DSE experienced NET / English language expert
Key Marking and Feedback Areas: ‘CLO’ (Content Language Organisation) / Genre awareness / Grammar and Language use / tone, register and style

  • Favicon1 Service description:
Schools submit a soft copy of the writing piece to Blue Water.
Our markers prioritize the area of feedback and guidance based on the needs of the school and the student. This could be a focus on the DSE marking criteria: Content, Language and Organisation, but feedback and guidance on genre awareness, grammar and use of English, or on tone and register can be more important for different students at different stages. We offer marking and feedback in any areas that a school or student needs.
After conducting initial marking in the requested areas, our markers will refer to the student’s individual learning map and consider any previously observed systematic errors, trends, or issues present in the work and add any new observations. This means that the more our markers work with a particular student’s work, the more effective support they are able to provide.
In the final stage, a detailed marking report is sent to the school with detailed targeted feedback, guidance, and an action plan for the student to follow up on. This plan is logged in a progress map that can guide and reinforce the student’s development over time.

Supplementary DSE Genre Awareness Programme

  • Favicon1 Options
Frequency: 1/2/3/4 sessions per student per week
Delivery: Online meeting via zoom/google meet/teams or viewing a recording of a meeting followed up by detailed marking
Teacher: English language expert
  • Favicon1 Service description:
Initially, students have the choice to participate in a live online seminar or view a recorded version. The seminar will delve into pivotal aspects of genre awareness that significantly contribute to proficient DSE writing, including strategies for question choice, organizing and structuring diverse text types, selecting and producing effective introduction structures for distinct genre types, and determining the tone and register for each genre type.
At the conclusion of every seminar, students receive a reinforcement task. After submission, this task is evaluated, and the students are given targeted feedback with the same level of meticulousness, long-term planning, and actionable guidance provided in any other Blue Water marking service.
The course can be taken as a whole, or in discrete parts pending the needs of the school and the students’ long term and/or emergent needs.