Services

DSE support for schools

Are your students underperforming in DSE speaking and writing?

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 and face-to-face

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

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.

The dilemma facing school leaders

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.

Resolved with Blue Water

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.

Enhancing the school curriculum

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.

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.

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.

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.