Every Child, Every Opportunitya presentation to the Victorian Department for Education and ECD

For brain development,for literacy,

for perspective,for empathy,

for self-concept,for opportunity...

What teachers do, we do for them

LOTEis an opportunity for

all children

“Every Opportunity” is a special challenge within LOTE as

differentlanguages offer

different opportunities,

as well as common benefits to different

extents.

• There are 453 000 children in Victorian primary schools:

• 333 000 study a LOTE,

27%

73%

☹☺

Missing Out!

• 120 000 (mostly rural) do not.

(VDEECD statistics)

Teachers are the KeyTeachers must know:

•what and how to teach, and

•be available to teach, under the prevailing conditions.

•“Focusing on linguistic knowledge appears to neglect the need for teachers to be able to impart that knowledge to students and trivialises the teaching knowledge needed to do so.“ Simpson Norris Pty Ltd for NALSAS taskforce 1999

Generalists Do Everything

Why not empower them to introduce LOTE?

10%

10%

20%

10%

10%

10%

10%

20%

English Arts ScienceHSIE LOTE MathsHDPE Tech

They introduce future physicists to science,

future artists to art, and future cellists to

music....

A response to many calls for innovation:“a universal apprenticeship in

learning how to learn languages”• Lo Bianco and Slaughter’s “Second Languages

and Australian Schooling” review concludes that the second of “four components of a broad strategy” should be “a universal apprenticeship in learning how to learn languages” in the primary years, so that students will “successfully transfer such skills to other languages”

• This 2-step process will enable many more children to to master a target language.

Equipping generalist teachers to provide the world’s most accessible LOTE can redress the inequities long before 2020, using the available time (even if it is sometimes only 200 hours in the whole of primary school !)

E$PERANTO:affordablecommunication

Empowering Change These materials were developed, by and for Australian primary generalist teachers, to enable them to learn Esperanto while teaching the entire working language to their classes.

Side-Benefits of Integrating Primary LOTE

• Seriousness and stability

• Less opportunity cost, so more acceptance

• Functional bilingualism before end of primary

• Continuity, completion and a head start in secondary LOTE.

• Sound values, meeting others halfway.

• Flexibility for later engagement with community and commercial languages.

Bilingual and ready for more

Thank you for your attention

About the Author

Penelope Vos (BSc Dip Ed) is a teacher, author and CEO of Mondeto Educational Resources.She is a graduate of Murdoch University and the Montessori World Education Institute, and has twenty years of teaching experience, in Science, Art and Esperanto in private, public and religious schools.Her most recent books are "Australian LOTE: Achieving Broad and Deep Competence in Languages at School" (2007) and "Talking to the Whole Wide World" (2009), a stand-alone resource to equip primary school generalists to teach a second language to fluency, in a context of global intercultural awareness, without prior training. The International Montessori Conference, 2010 will see the launch of the long-in-development “Talking to the Whole Wide World” Montessori Materials.

Thank you