Page 42 - Languages Victoria December 2019

Languages Victoria
since the workshop has shown us how much it means to acknowledge home language and backgrounds.
We learned that students do not need to be constructing detailed and accurate speech to feel success and engagement, and that reward for taking risks (in the form of a collection of pegs that can be traded for a Mintie!) encourages our students to make continued effort. Interestingly, all of the activities and their associated benefits are not news to teachers – we know that there is a time for fluency versus accuracy, we know that positive reinforcement works, and we know that students want to feel valued for who they are. However, seeing this implemented in a languages-specific context and how easy it is really made it clear for us what we need to change in our teaching strategies and program to make languages a visible and valued learning area. Being in a position where we actually had to trial these learning activities with students on the day of the workshop added an extra level to our professional learning. It is easy to read a website or professional text, or go to a teaching conference and think “maybe I’ll give that a go” or “but how does that work for languages?”, but being able to actually do it straight away taught us so much about our students. It also forced us to reflect deeply on what we are doing in our classrooms.
Moving forward, we are sharing our professional learning from the day with our colleagues in the languages department. Our 2020 forward planning will include rich discussion on how to implement these oral strategies across every year level to build student engagement with languages. Teachers who attended the workshop will be giving demonstration lessons and recording our teaching to share implementation tips. We will continue to evaluate throughout 2020 and use student data to assess the impact of these activities on learning growth.
For teachers and schools considering how to build engagement with languages, a key message from the day is to give genuine representation to students’ home languages. Some ideas are to make language diversity visible through greetings during home group, or have students teach classmates and teachers basic phrases with gestures. We found we held the misconception that students don’t care about learning languages. However, we now know that students really do know the value of learning languages, but articulating this only came to the surface once we celebrated the language diversity of our own students. We will be continuing to reinforce this with our students with a goal of building retention into senior years of study.
If your school is interested in hosting an in-school professional learning day, or you wish to participate in one in the future, please register your interest with MLTAV: info@mltav.asn.au
Page 42 Volume 23 Number 2