Category: languages

CLIL is – Content and Language Integrated Learning and basically involves teaching cross-curricularly, delivering other subjects through the language. Do Coyle is the driving force behind this. The ideal is that the subject specialist delivers the lessons in the language, but it’s more likely that the MFL specialist will deliver eg history, or possibly the subject and the MFL teacher team teaching. You might also use the FLA to support the subject specialist. I’m interested in this as Whitehouse Common is involved in a project with three foci, one of which is CLIL.

I was somewhat disappointed to discover that the Hampshire Language Conference this year was not being held at Marwell Zoo, and excited to discover that it was to be held at The Ark. So far no animals have appeared and its a lovely day so you might guess that it’s not a big boat.

I Love You In 100 Languages by michelleoshen
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Just caught up with an article in The Independent on Monday with the headline –

Apparently, in a survey commissioned by Michael Thomas,

An average of £145,000 more earned over a lifetime? Linguists easier to match for dating agencies as they are seen as more intelligent and sexier? Can this be true?

I don’t know but I like the sound of it!

I read the above Tweet and decided to investigate.

It took me to Building Peace, the blog of Reach364, a Captain in the US Airforce and C-17 pilot, and a post that begins with a question –

Why should American military officers learn foreign languages? For that matter, why should Foreign Service Officers or any other representatives of the American government?

And whilst the context of the article is military, considering the situation in Afghanistan and Jordan, the comments Reach makes are relevant to language learning in general, not just in volatile situations.

Acknowledging that advances in technology and translation software mean that people can ‘talk’ to one another without being able to speak the language, Reach makes the following statement –

I still believe learning human languages the old fashioned way is important. Why? This is the crux: foreign language ability is not just about converting information from one format to another. It’s about human relationships.

He talks of language as ‘a way of building relationships, of winning trust.‘ Couldn’t agree more. How many times have I been met with a beaming smile and extra special attention because I spoke in Spanish, French, Catalan, or even when I attempted to speak German in Switzerland? I see it as a mark of respect to attempt to communicate in someone’s language, even if it is a job to get your mouth around the sounds and intonation. I’ve mentioned before that some of my favourite and most rewarding teaching experiences have been when pupils have led, sharing their experiences and language with joy and pride – and been amused by my efforts!

As Nelson Mandela said –

Reach concludes –

Language is extremely hard. We need as many language solutions as we can get, and technology certainly can and should help fill the gap. But no matter how good the technology gets, no matter how prevalent English becomes, old-fashioned speaking of a foreign language still matters.

Certainly with him there.

What do you think?

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Learn a language – see through the eyes of others, originally uploaded by acjeppo.

Love this poster from Andrew Jeppesen (@ajep)
Beautiful photograph – and such a true statement.

Just read an interesting article in The Telegraph Education section with the above title. It reports on a group in the Harrogate area called French for Fidgets (a great name for the group!) that teaches French to toddlers through song and games. Taking kids as young as 18 months, their philosophy is –

“… to make it fun. When devising these classes, I asked myself what children this age enjoy doing and the answer was singing, eating and rolling around the floor. So that’s what we do. It just happens we speak French while we’re doing it.”

I’ve taught Kindergarten at a previous school and also had pupils as young as 18 months, so I can completely agree with and endorse the benefits of catching them early. In fact there were children with emergent speech who had as many words in Spanish as in English – and all that from 20 minutes first thing on a Monday! The analogy ‘little sponges’ is a very apt one.

And research backs this up – Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith of the Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development in London is quoted in the article saying –

“Right from birth, the brain has the capacity to learn three or four different languages and in many countries that’s what happens,” she says. “In fact, the majority of children in the world are bilingual, either because their country has a number of borders or because their parents speak different languages.

“The typical pattern is for a child to learn one language from their father, one from their mother and another at school or in the street. As for brain capacity, I know children with Down’s syndrome who have three languages simultaneously. The truth is that languages shouldn’t be introduced at primary school, but at nursery school.”

And she concludes with a radical idea-

“Teach a language at nursery school and you won’t need to teach it at secondary,” she maintains. “By that time, the children will already be able to speak it.”

I love this poster, shared with me on Twitter by @nwinton from the imaginatively named I love Typography blog in a post entitled Diacritical Challenge. The challenge is to a) name the font and b) identify the diacritical marks!

I’ve got to say that I couldn’t name all of them but there are plenty of people having a go in the comments!!

The subtitle of the post is ‘Squiggly bits’ which is how many of the pupils I teach describe them. As they’re unfamiliar in our language, it can take a bit of explaining but ñ isn’t too hard to explain, and the accents in Spanish to show where to stress words is easily explained when I mispronounce their names by stressing the wrong bit. And ¡ and ¿ are explained by the need to know if something is a question or exclamation a the beginning of the sentence so that your intonation is correct – cue much overacting ;o)

All counts towards Knowledge about Language!

Some of you may recall a blog post in July about a group from English Martyrs School and Sixth Form College, Hartlepool, winning Company of the Year and Most Creative Company of the Year in the Young Enterprise in the NorthEast sponsored by The Arts Council NorthEast for their product LanguAges.

For those who don’t, here’s a brief recap from the group ;

Our company, LanguAges, provides educational resources to aid the teaching and learning of French in primary schools at Key Stage 2. We have created a compilation of three different games, The Clothes Game, The Class Card Game and The Shopping Game, and an Interactive CD, which form the LanguAges Pack.

All of our games are tailored to be fun, yet educational, comprehensively covering the Key Stage 2 curriculum, and helping to improve vital comprehension and speaking skills.

Having tested the product and marketed it to Stockton schools, all schools in Hartlepool should now have a copy of the materials.

A representative from the Hartlepool local authority, Tom Argument, said: “Their materials are creative, fun, very practical, and of a high quality. The group present themselves in a business-like manner and have real entrepreneurial potential.”

The group went on to discuss the future-

We realise that LanguAges has a huge amount of potential, and are currently investigating the many options available to us. Several possibilities are being considered, such as selling the idea, or even continuing the company even after the Young Enterprise Company Programme is over.

The prospect of mass producing the LanguAges Pack and even expanding the range to include a variety of other modern foreign languages is a very exciting one.

Today I received news from their (very proud) teacher, Madame Welsh, about LanguAges.

An update….they did brilliantly well at the National Finals, winning the Award for Financial Management. They are working with a company http://www.tts-group.co.uk/ to market their product further afield! They make me so proud!

So well done once more to the LanguAges team for their continuing success – a great example of language learning going hand in hand with other areas of the curriculum.

And a pat on the back to TTS for seeing the potential of the product. TTS is currently one of my favourite school shopping places so I’ll be watching out for the arrival of the products!

I came across an interesting news report via my GoogleAlerts from The Kerryman paper in Ireland, entitled Enthralling tales from afar. The report begins…

It goes on to say that this is the second time that this type of visit has been made possible by the GoetheInstitut, and that the aim of the exercise was to encourage primary pupils to learn German in a fun environment.

“There has been a growing interest in teaching and learning modern foreign languages at primary level in Europe and research shows how enthusiastic teachers and children are,” Georgia Herlt, head of the language department at the Goethe-Institut Dublin, stated.

“As well as learning languages it helps with cultural awareness and combats stereotypes, and the children are geared up for it when they go to secondary school.”

The visits saw Suse Weisse using familiar and less well known fairytales in German (with explanations in English).
I love using stories to teach primary languages for many reasons. For example;

• familiarity of structure
• familiarity of story
• children enjoy being read to
• making links between English and the language of the story
• you can do all kinds of things with a story – drama, games, jigsaw texts
• using them as a model for production of new stories
• easy to embed sound in story powerpoints to help non specialist teachers
• I enjoy doing the voices ;o)

I could go on!

So I’m all for these visits – when a Year2 class told me that they’d worked out from listening to and reading Rubiales on the Northumberland GfL that Spanish put the adjective after the noun whereas English put it before, I was sold on the use of stories to teach!

Off to see if I can find a Spanish storyteller now…;o)

I have been criticised before for ‘posting in a foreign language’ on ¡Vámonos! A little harsh, I felt, as the blog is subtitled ‘Teaching and learning Primary Languages in the 21st century’. (comment to that effect has been deleted from the post!) However, I am aware that there are readers who do not speak Spanish or Catalan, the two main languages (other than English!) in which I blog. Since its inception, ¡Vámonos! has had a ‘translate’ widget in the right hand sidebar for just this reason, and I recommended the use of Google Translate last year.

Last week, I discovered that Google Reader now offers the opportunity to have your reading translated into a language that you understand. So, if you have subscribed to my blog using GoogleReader, and didn’t understand a word of the previous post, this is for you!

Go to view settings…select ‘Translate into my language’ (that is the language that you have set as default for your reader) …..

and Bob’s your Uncle!

The translation isn’t perfect – me chifló seems to have it stumped! – but you can get the gist!

So, now there’s no excuse for not reading my blog, eh?? ;o)