Beyond serving as valuable material for teaching language, the news is a window to the wider world—one that sparks curiosity and sharpens critical thinking in students. In this spirit, ZBSchools strives to work closely with Chinese-language teachers in Singapore to provide students with reliable, educational news content.
Lianhe Zaobao’s (LHZB) ZBSchools held its first appreciation tea at the SPH News Centre on Friday (30 October). LHZB editor Ang Yiting and ZBSchools editor Lim Xin Hui presented awards to schools and Chinese-language teachers who had actively used its news and learning platform, ZBSchools.sg, over the past year.
Chung Cheng High School (Main), which uses ZBSchools.sg to develop students’ logical thinking, received an Active School Award for ranking among the top 10 schools nationwide for its student account activation rate. It also won a Reading Excellence Award, with its students reading the highest number of articles per person.
With students’ attention spans declining and many finding it difficult to concentrate on reading throughout a lesson, Chung Cheng High teacher Chen Xinyu said in an interview that she had found short videos useful for introducing lessons and sparking students’ interest in reading independently. By pairing short videos with articles, the ZBSchools platform has become an effective bridge to more in-depth reading.
Building on efforts to spark interest in reading, teachers at Chung Cheng High have also introduced a Reading Ambassadors programme to create a positive cycle in which “input” and “output” reinforce each other. Upper-secondary students select articles and write introduction scripts, then share them with the school during morning assembly and pose discussion questions. Teachers subsequently guide students through the original articles, help them answer the questions and have them draw mind maps to organise the content.
Wu I-Hsuan, the school’s head of Chinese Language, said: “Reading is ‘input’, but the school places equal emphasis on ‘output’. This not only helps students organise news content and their own thoughts, but also encourages them to discuss current issues with others outside class and develop the habit of thinking independently. This is a crucial ability, both for language learning and everyday life.”
Schools that recorded a substantial increase in student users this year were also recognised with Most Improved School Awards. Whitley Secondary School in Bishan was one of five recipients.
ZBSchools.sg becomes a key tool for lesson planning and teaching
Whitley Secondary School’s head of Mother Tongue Language, Lim Eu Boon, said ZBSchools.sg had become an important tool for teachers in both lesson planning and teaching. She noted that its built-in vocabulary lookup, Hanyu Pinyin and text-to-speech features spared teachers the laborious task of gathering and compiling materials from various sources. The website’s wide range of current affairs topics provided particularly useful, topical material for preparing Secondary 4 students for oral examinations and argumentative writing.
ZBSchools’ Mandarin talk show Let’s Yap has also proved effective in encouraging students to express themselves. Teacher Chen Wenya said many students lacked confidence in speaking, while the natural, fluent contributions of their peers on the programme offered a model to follow. “When students see their peers expressing themselves confidently, they gain the courage to try, push past their limits and take that crucial first step.”
Under the “News At Your Fingertips” initiative jointly launched by the Ministry of Education, Ngee Ann Kongsi and SPH Media, all secondary school students in Singapore have been given free ZBSchools.sg accounts since 2022. These provide access to a wide range of content tailored to students’ Chinese-language proficiency and interests. All Chinese-language teachers also have free access to the full LHZB website, allowing them to use news content in their classrooms.
Lim Xin Hui said ZBSchools would continue to strengthen its collaboration with Chinese-language teachers and produce more news resources suited to teaching. ZBSchools.sg will also undergo another round of improvements next year to offer teachers and students a better user experience.
She said: “Learning is a lifelong pursuit. We hope to turn news into content that young people can readily digest and understand, and explore more topics of interest to secondary school students. Through news, students can not only improve their language skills, but also develop curiosity, thinking skills and media literacy, so that when they step into society, they can confidently handle complex issues and challenges.”
