Weekly
1 · Free Talk
An open English conversation station staffed by our foreign teachers. No marks, no script — children come during break, pick a topic card and talk. Shy children start by listening; by the third week most are talking.
bilingual
Bilingual & International Education
English at Magong Elementary is not a subject you sit through. It is something you use — at break time, on stage, in the corridor, and in the recording booth.
Explore our international education
Meet the world through food and music
Follow the places, tastes and sounds our students have explored on campus.
THURSDAY LUNCH · 國際餐食日
International Lunch Thursdays
Discover the stories behind our themed meals, with learning cards, school lunch photos and questions for students.
Explore the lunch stories →
THURSDAY RADIO · 國際音樂選播Thursday World Music Radio
Meet our student DJs and listen to songs selected for each country, with notes on what makes the music distinctive.
Meet the student DJs →
Why it matters here
An island is not the edge of the world
Penghu is small and far from Taiwan's main island. It would be easy for children growing up here to assume that the wider world happens elsewhere. Our bilingual and international education programme exists to make sure they never think that.
We began trialling bilingual instruction in 2021 and have been building the programme ever since — not by adding more English lessons, but by using English inside other subjects, and by creating dozens of small, low-stakes moments each week where a child speaks English to a real person for a real reason.
- 2021 — first year of partial-subject bilingual teaching
- 2023 — bilingual curriculum framework formally established
- Ongoing — locally rooted international education programme
English certification
Vocabulary, checked school-wide
The English teaching team runs a whole-school vocabulary certification so every child knows exactly where they are — and what to aim at next.
The programme
Six ways English lives on our campus
Each one was designed by our own teachers and refined over several years.
Reading
2 · Tomorrow English Reading
English picture books turned into audiobooks — many of them narrated by our own students. Beginners hear a familiar classmate's voice, which makes the leap into English reading feel much smaller.
Clubs
3 · English Picture Book Club
An after-school club where our foreign teacher supports small-group dialogue practice built around a shared story. Reading and speaking taught as one activity rather than two.
In lessons
4 · English in digital open classes
English taught with the same tools as everything else — big screens, tablets and live class response. Lessons are opened up for other teachers to watch, so the practice spreads.
Competition
5 · English recitation & singing
School heats feed into the Penghu County English speech and recitation competition and the Chang Wen-Chin Foundation contest. Our students have taken top honours in county English singing competition.
Whole school
6 · Magong Children's Literature Bookshop
A dedicated reading space on campus holding both Chinese and English collections. It also hosts our International Education Quest, where children hunt down answers to questions written by teachers across every subject.
Our teachers
Foreign and local teachers, planning together
A foreign teacher parachuted into a classroom once a week does very little. What works is co-planning: our local English specialists and foreign teachers design lessons side by side, so the English a child hears in a science lesson connects to the English they practised at Free Talk that morning.
- Co-taught lessons in English and selected subject areas
- Foreign teachers embedded in clubs, festivals and break-time activities
- Shared planning time between local and foreign staff
- Bilingual teaching methodology training for all subject teachers
Co-teaching
Planned together, taught together
Shared planning time means the English a child meets in one lesson connects to the English they used in the last.
Culture through celebration
Festivals as language lessons
The easiest way to learn what a culture values is to celebrate with it.
October
Halloween
Creative costumes made from recycled materials, a whole-school runway show, and English trick-or-treat dialogues at every classroom door.
December
Christmas carolling
A long-standing tradition: every class takes the stage on Christmas Eve to sing English carols, combining English, music, life curriculum and performing arts in one event.
Whole year
Classroom internationalisation
Classes decorate for festivals from around the world, supported by the school's internationalisation grant — so the calendar on the wall is never only local.
Explore Thursday World Music Radio and meet our student DJs →
Also part of the picture
Penghu Indigenous Peoples Education Resource Center
International education is not only about looking outward. Since 2020 our campus has hosted the county's Indigenous Peoples Education Resource Center, supporting indigenous language and cultural education for schools across Penghu.
Alongside it, our language programme includes Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka and New Immigrant languages — reflecting the actual families who send their children here.
Ask us about the centreLanguages taught or supported
- Mandarin Chinese — medium of instruction
- English — from Grade 3, plus bilingual subject teaching
- Taiwanese Hokkien — local language curriculum
- Hakka — local language curriculum
- Indigenous languages — via the county resource centre
- New Immigrant languages — for children of immigrant families
Partner with us
We welcome sister-school relationships, teacher exchanges and video-conference partnerships with schools overseas.