follows a national or international curriculum different from that of the host country’
follows a national or international curriculum different from that of the host country’ (Nagrath, 2011), my said school teaches Chinese for half of the day, and then students learn English/ English grammar for the remainder of the day. This to me, is an intensive course of learning English, rather than internationally learning about English culture.
I am also in agreement that for an international school to exist, it must compose of ‘an international curriculum, a multi-national student body, and a multinational, English-speaking faculty’ (Anon., found in Nagrath, 2011).
Hayden and Thompson (2008:28) state many reasons in their opinion as to what makes a school truly international, and I am in agreement with a lot of them. I agree that students should frequently be non-nationals of the of the host country. This is extremely important me in that if you have a wide cultured student body, then students will be forced to speak in the same language, rather than perhaps their first language, and they will be learning about different cultures and people’s lives outside school. In addition, I agree that a school should be ‘staffed by relatively large numbers of expatriate teachers and administrators’, (Hayden and Thompson, 2008:28). This is something I feel quite personally about; on a daily basis I will often find it a little difficult to communicate with my co-workers, and I always have the feeling that I am forcing them to speak English, however this shouldn’t be the case if the school was truly international. As a foreigner, I am by large, the minority in the international school I currently teach at.
In the UNESCO report I chose to read the chapter about students. It states in this report that an international school is a place for expatriate children to attend before moving on to their next location (UNESCO: Hayden and Thompson, 2008, p43). I truly believe this is what an international school be; a student should be able to be picked up and taken to anywhere else in the world and not have their education interrupted.
