Language
Learning in the
Language
Learning in the
Students learn language in all KLAs when:
- • it is used in real situations achieve real goals
- • investigations spring from the students' immediate environment and the content builds upon students' previous experience and knowledge
- • students are in a supportive and relevant environment where mistakes are OK
- • oral language is modelled, both through teacher-student and student-student interaction
- • classroom tasks include opportunities for both BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency)
- • all four language skills are used: reading, writing, listening and talking
- • students are able to manipulate, handle or observe physical objects or living things
In practice this means....
- • students need to be actively involved in tasks
- • cognitively and linguistically challenging tasks are needed to further develop the bilingual student's language
- • the topic needs to be relevant and engaging
- • language needs to be modelled and the students given opportunity to practice and take risks
- • the use of concrete experiences which develop and consolidate the students' learning and understanding of concepts
Mathematics
- Some things to note:
- • Some children from language backgrounds other than English will have had extensive mathematics experience and will have developed significant skills.
- • Students may need support with problem solving approaches as this may not have been part of the child's previous experience.
- • Use of the child's first language in lessons (if possible) will support their ongoing conceptual development.
- • Care should be taken to ensure that classroom activities, materials and resources reflect the cultural diversity of children in the classroom.
- • Concrete materials and real life problems are very important in a mathematics lesson as they simultaneously aid English language use and conceptual development .
- • Teachers should avoid making assumptions about a child's mathematical skills from stereotypical images of his or her ethnic group.
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Science & Technology
- Sample activities:
- • hands-on experiments and use of visuals
- • brainstorming
- • oral presentations: reports, explanations and procedures; informal/formal
- • writing reports, explanations and procedures
- • reading a variety of genuine texts for information
- • text sequencing and and reconstruction, dictogloss, semantic webs, structured overview
- • matrices, flow charts, diagram labelling
- • vocabulary activities: cloze, cline, matching words with definitions, unjumbling words, word banks
- • prediction activities, inquiry & elimination, information gap, rank ordering
Visual Arts
- Children learn and use language in Visual Arts when:
- • they look at and talk about their own artworks and the artworks of others. Students can communicate what they see, feel and think as they view art forms.
- • they use, explore and discuss various media when creating artworks.
- • activities are designed to build on their prior knowledge and experiences.
- Sample activities:
- • Display artworks of people/a person. Students talk about each picture:
- What is the person doing?
- Where is the person?
- How is this person feeling?
- Why do you think they feel this way
- What might give you those ideas?
- • Display four artworks. Four volunteers select an object from one artwork and represent this as a statue with their bodies. The remainder of the class attempts to guess what the object is and the artwork it is from.
- • Students study four artworks of chairs. In pairs they rank the artworks from most to least favourite. Two pairs then collaborate to come to a decision on a rank order and so on.
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This page was created by Johanna Lloyd and Miriam Shipard
October 1998