ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses an example of integrating social justice themes within the constraints of a preset language curriculum. Most courses at the school use International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and A-level curriculum. Students are required to take English classes every year, and in grades 9 and 10, the school provides an IGCSE English as a second language curriculum. The courses focused on developing academic English with thematic units and a variety of language-based assessments, including speeches and essays. As the students are mostly local, Mandarin Chinese is the first language of the majority of students. However, many students also are proficient in the local Suzhou language, which is a dialect of the Wu language and not mutually intelligible with standard Mandarin Chinese. In the 11th grade English curriculum, there is a predetermined set of skills, i.e., emphasis and word stress, with a set type of final assessment, i.e., a speech.
