{"id":3877,"date":"2010-03-21T19:02:11","date_gmt":"2010-03-21T19:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2010\/03\/harmony-and-languages-in-the-curriculum\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:46:50","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:46:50","slug":"harmony-and-languages-in-the-curriculum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2010\/03\/harmony-and-languages-in-the-curriculum\/","title":{"rendered":"Harmony and languages in the curriculum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>21st of March is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harmony.gov.au\/harmony-day\/whats-it-all-about.htm\">Harmony Day<\/a> in Australia, promoted by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.  Among ideas for teachers&#8217; lessons are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Language treasure hunt: Use your class\/school mates as a resource to &#8216;collect&#8217; basic words or expressions in other languages.\n<li>Borrowed words: Search the internet to compile a list of words commonly used in English that have been borrowed from other languages.\n<li>Where does your name come from? Research the cultural origins of first or last names. Do they have a meaning? Are there variations of your name in other languages eg John\/Ivan\/ Giovanni\/Johann?\n<li>Linguists: Find out how many people in your class\/school are bilingual or multilingual.\n<li> Body language: Ask schoolmates from various cultural backgrounds what gestures they would use to show the following: &#8216;Come here&#8217;, &#8216;Go away&#8217;, &#8216;I don&#8217;t know&#8217;, &#8216;Crazy&#8217;, &#8216;OK&#8217;, &#8216;Good&#8217;, &#8216;Yes&#8217;, &#8216;No&#8217;.\n<li>Roll call: Say &#8216;good morning\/afternoon&#8217; in a different language each week.\n<li>Diverse scripts: Can any of your classmates write in another script (eg Korean, Arabic)? Ask them to write your name in this script.<\/ul>\n<p>\nA good start but I guess this assumes that primary students mostly WON&#8217;T be learning a language other than English in any depth.<br \/>\nSo, what to do?   Well, we can all comment on the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority&#8217;s start on designing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acara.edu.au\/languages.html \">a curriculum on languages<\/a>.<br \/>\nMy initial comment is that the very first ACARA question &#8216;what is an appropriate rationale for learning languages?&#8217; blurs the fact that there are different rationales depending on what the state of the students&#8217; knowledge of the language is, and what the state of the documentation of the language is.<br \/>\n2. With respect to Indigenous languages, at least the following situations should be recognised.<br \/>\n&#8211;Indigenous languages as L1: strengthening<br \/>\n&#8211;Indigenous languages as L2:   learning from scratch &#8211; and this in turn will differ according to how well documented the language, and whether there are speakers left of it.<br \/>\nThere&#8217;s been a fair bit of work done on learning Indigenous languages as L2 (see for example the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au\/syllabus_sc\/pdf_doc\/ab_language_k10_syl.pdf\">NSW syllabus<\/a> [.pdf].  But there has been very little work done on how to strengthen children&#8217;s command of Indigenous languages that they speak as first languages.  Go Curriculum writers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>21st of March is Harmony Day in Australia, promoted by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Among ideas for teachers&#8217; lessons are: Language treasure hunt: Use your class\/school mates as a resource to &#8216;collect&#8217; basic words or expressions in other languages. Borrowed words: Search the internet to compile a list of words commonly used in &#8230; <a title=\"Harmony and languages in the curriculum\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2010\/03\/harmony-and-languages-in-the-curriculum\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Harmony and languages in the curriculum\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4184,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3877\/revisions\/4184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}