How can language learning be promoted?
- Language-learning outcomes should be specified alongside curriculum learning outcomes.
- When language and curriculum content objectives are integrated, the language outcomes should be sequenced.
Planning language development
The inquiry Curriculum outcomes and language outcomes explores the relationship between curriculum and language outcomes, and discusses how to address them together in planning teaching. This inquiry goes further, and looks at planning language outcomes in all the language modes.
The extract below is from Science in the New Zealand Curriculum. What do these achievement objectives require students to do?
Science: Making Sense of the Physical World: Level 5
Achievement objectives
Students can:
- carry out simple practical investigations, with control of variables, into common physical phenomena, and relate their findings to scientific ideas, e.g., energy content of fuels, reflection/refraction, electromagnets, forces and motion, simple electrical circuits, wave motion
- describe various ways in which energy can be transformed and transferred in our everyday world, e.g., rockets, electric blankets, hair driers
- investigate and describe the patterns associated with physical phenomena – some patterns may be expressed in graphical terms, e.g., links between voltages and currents in circuits, heat and temperature, forces and simple levers
- investigate how physical devices or systems can be used to perform specified functions, e.g., an arch to support a bridge, a moisture tester for house plants, light-emitting diodes as off/on indicators.
Assessment examples
Teachers and students could assess the students’:
- ability to control variables in an investigation to determine magnetic strength, when the students construct electromagnets
- ability to identify the energy transformations occurring in a list of given situations, when the students write answers to test questions
- ability to collect and analyse data from a variety of sources, when the students present a report on local energy resources
- ability to draw a graph competently, when the students plot values of extension and load for a spring
- ability to relate a knowledge of chemistry to their design of a device, when they explain the operation of a moisture detector
- problem-solving ability, when the students design and construct alternative model bridge spans to carry a given load.
The achievement objectives in the example above require students to:
- describe scientific processes
- carry out investigations
- describe these investigations
- relate their findings to scientific ideas.
The assessment examples suggest the following language skills will be needed:
- writing answers to test questions
- collecting data
- analysing data
- presenting the analysis in a report
- drawing a graph
- giving explanations.
These requirements and suggestions can provide the starting points for teachers to develop checklists of all the language outcomes students need at this level. For example, level 5 science students have to be able to construct and label graphs and tables, and they have to describe investigations and give explanations, either by speaking or by writing, using words alone or in conjunction with graphic representations.
Language for learning
Good language-learning activities develop students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills as tools for curriculum learning.
Effective teachers ensure that all of their students learn the full range of language they need for:
- full participation in the learning community
- successful and continued learning.
The language component of your programme should cover the language modes of speaking, listening, reading, writing, viewing, and presenting. Within each of these ways of using language, you will also focus on words (vocabulary), phrases, sentences, and whole texts. The inquiries under the topic headings Learning the language of education and Focus on language look at how to do this.
Written language
Different types of writing are recycled through the year, giving students many opportunities to achieve success in each of them. The reading programme links with the writing programme, enabling students to develop skills in reading different kinds of material on each subject. Teachers use their professional expertise to decide which texts their students can read or write independently and which they need guidance with, as a class, in pairs, or in groups.
Oral language
Teachers of students in the early years of schooling are generally familiar with developing oral language. However, oral language remains important for learning throughout a student’s schooling, and beyond. Many experts consider that conceptual thought and all knowledge emerge from and develop through language processes that are rooted in the spoken dialogue between people. (See the inquiry How we scaffold language .)
The section Students working together examines how spoken interaction helps in language learning, but also helps learners to explore and understand content fully, and to prepare for reading and writing.
David Corson (1988) discusses some of these views and explores in detail how oral language can be integrated across the curriculum in schools. (See also the Literature Review Section, 5.3.5, in Franken, May, and McComish, 2005.)
ESOL Online has a number of useful professional readings on oral language. These include the matrix for Oral language: Interpersonal Speaking and Listening: Discussion from the English curriculum exemplars. This could be a useful tool for working on Investigation A.
The inquiries under the topic headings How do we use language in school? , Students working together , and Curriculum and language development contain many ideas for spoken interaction in curriculum learning.
Language development needs of bilingual Pasifika students
As discussed elsewhere in this resource, we use language to learn and extend new concepts, and to develop an interconnected network of knowledge and understanding. While it is important that all students experience the appropriate language-learning opportunities at the appropriate times, this is particularly important for bilingual Pasifika students, especially those whose use of English is mostly confined to school and homework centres.
Bilingual students achieve the best educational results when they have opportunities to read and discuss concepts in their first language, even if that language is not the medium of instruction. (See the inquiry Affirming biliteracy .) Furthermore, school is usually the only place where bilingual Pasifika students are systematically provided with appropriate opportunities to develop knowledge of the ways in which academic language differs from everyday language.
