To accept another language, is to accept other people. Learning another language is an exercise in good will…
“ I come to you, you don’t have to come to me.”
Our language teachers have grown up in the cultures and traditions of the language they bring to our school, which imbues the entire language program with depth and authenticity.
We operate from the simple and practical belief that there is no better doorway into another people or culture, than to study their language.
Contact with other languages such as Hebrew, Classic Greek, Sanskrit and Latin is made through the study of the Epochs in Primary school.
German
The pictorial nature of words in German makes it an accessible and in some ways ideal language to bring to children.
At school, the children experience German first – and always – by being immersed in the teacher’s spoken language. Often, there is good natured laughter as the interactive joy of the situation makes itself known. Then as time and experience permit, simple conversations and exchanges emerge. From this comes reading and comprehension of simple short stories, exploration of ideas, songs, speech, movement, reading material, and writing.
French
As a language, French remains the carrier of the ‘romantic’ element and it is this element of ‘savoir vivre’ which we want to bring to our students.
As with German, our students participate initially via immersion in the culture through their teacher. From this comes reading, comprehension, exploration of ideas, songs, speech, movement, reading material and writing.
International Mother Language Day 21 February 2020
This day is the opportunity to celebrate languages, multilingualism and diversity.
300 languages, including many indigenous languages, are spoken in Australia. 20% of people in Australia speak another language at home. Our school reflects the broader Australian society as we also have about the same percentage of parents speaking a language other than English at home. Our school community speaks 24 languages. The most spoken one is Mandarin followed in decreasing order by German, Japanese and French, Dutch, Greek, Arabic and Spanish. Other Asian languages are Persian, Tamil, Vietnamese, Malay, Cantonese and Korean. Other European languages are Norwegian, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Italian.
Our school encourages the use of community languages at home and the International Mother Language Day might be an opportunity for families in our school community to take a few minutes to think about how they might want to celebrate this special day by reading a book with or to their children in their language or speak to their children and their friends in their language.
There is an excellent ABC podcast about languages, the 5-part series “Tongue tied and fluent” which explores Australia through our many languages.
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/features/tongue-tied-and-fluent/
MRSS Language Department.