From 7th July to August 3rd, CityU students attended a four-week English Language and Culture Courses at Western Sydney University (WSU) in Australia and all of them gained a lot of wonderful experiences.
14 CityU students joined the English language courses at WSU with other students from all around the world. Besides, WSU set up Australian cultural competence courses for our students, which allowed our students to learn language skills and experience Australian multicultural, aboriginal culture as well as common slang. Through the active classroom atmosphere and various teaching methods designed by the teachers, CityU students can leanred English from listening, speaking, reading and writing aspects more systematically.
In addition to the classroom learning, WSU also arranged accommodation families with different cultural backgrounds for our students. With their help, students could immerse themselves in the English language environment outside the classroom and fully experience the multicultural atmosphere in Australia. From the very first week when students needed to adapt to the classroom learning and accommodation family lives, explore the local public transportation, to gradually getting familiar with the local environment, athough there were some confusions and challenges during the process, students quickly adjusted their mentalities and participated into the classroom learning as well as their fresh new lives in Australia.
Every Friday, WSU will organize a variety of outdoor activities for students to have a better understanding of the city and its cultural characteristics. Although the weekend is free for students to arrange, they spontaneously organized a variety of interesting group activities. On Sundays, some host families would also invite students to participate in family-day activities to feel the warm family atmosphere.
As the course drew to the end, the students were very unwilling to leave since they had just become familiar with the environment of Sydney. However, they would always remember the unforgettable and precious memories of participating in the summer program in WSU . While gaining knowledge, they also made friends with people from different regions and cultural backgrounds, which help them to develop their independent living abilities and self-confidences for future study and life.