Sarasas Ektra School
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Sarasas Ektra School is a bilingual co-educational school located in Central Bangkok. In 1995, it became the first bilingual school to be approved as such by the Ministry of Education in Thailand. As of 2006, the school has approximately 3000 students, and conducts a fully bilingual program in Thai and English from Kindergarten 1 (3 year-olds) to Matayom 6 (17 year-olds).
Sarasas Ektra is one of 19 schools in the Sarasas Affiliation, 10 of which have bilingual programmes.
[edit] Curriculum
The model of bilingual education applied at Sarasas Ektra is known as parallel immersion. Students are taught the key learning areas in both English and Thai - learning the curriculum first in the mother tongue (Thai) and then again in English. The Thai and English lessons are taught by different teachers and no language-switching occurs in either lesson. It is expected that the Thai-medium lesson will provide content and conceptual knowledge at a deeper level than the English lesson, as the former is in the students' first language. The English-medium lesson will give more emphasis to the language specific to the content. This model has also been described as "mother-tongue content instruction followed by English for academic purposes". On completion of schooling at Sarasas Ektra, students are expected to be equally able to pursue higher education in Thai-medium or English-medium courses.
