The positive effects of learning a language spread to other subjects
Paula Kasper is a year 5/6 teacher at Hereworth School. She has been teaching for almost 20 years
and had originally specialised in languages in her degree.
In 2014 Paula was keen to see her school embrace languages in a serious way. She felt that raising
the profile of language learning fitted with the school’s focus on academic excellence.
Paula saw an advertisement for Teacher Professional Development Languages (TPDL) and saw the
opportunity to bring her LOTE (Languages Other than English) training up to date. Although Paula
had not taught Japanese she enrolled in TPDL to teach Japanese.
The difference that learning Japanese made to her students was huge.
In Paula’s class ‘were students that already presented with learning difficulties. Learning Japanese,
which is phonetic, and the fact that they were the only class receiving this instruction really made a
difference to their academic focus. Their confidence grew exponentially and this in turn affected
their other academic subjects through a renewed focus to learning’, Paula says.
Through TPDL, Paula improved her own range of languages; upskilled in her professional knowledge
of languages pedagogy and discussed an observed lesson with a facilitator once a term. She
embraced the idea of task-supported learning and found that it worked in other areas of the
curriculum she needed to teach. For example in a science lesson she found her students became
motivated and excited about building a paper plane when she allowed them to take control of
negotiating the design of the plane and the ways to test how well it worked. Exploring the features
and performance of a paper plane became a task for the students. Paula feels that language
teachers are sometimes unfairly pigeonholed as doing something different and she wanted to show
that strategies useful to learning languages work in other areas as well. Many people view learning
languages as too difficult but Paula’s class have demonstrated that this is not so.
Task-supported learning suited this class who had not always done well at an earlier stage of their
education. They felt special as, initially, they were the only students in the school learning Japanese.
At a Middle School event parents saw how well their sons were doing: Japanese even became a
secret code that boosted students’ morale. Paula also detected a positive social spin-off in her class
because of the success in Japanese learning. Learning Japanese distinguished her class from the rest
of the school.
Students in an adjacent classroom heard Paula’s class learning Japanese and asked if they could
learn as well. She arranged to take this second class for Japanese lessons.
As part of TPDL she learnt French through Te Kura The Correspondence School and her students
liked the fact that she was on a learning journey as well as them. She understood how they were
feeling as they grappled with learning a new language.
A staff member at her school noticed that students removed their shoes outside the Japanese
classroom and asked why. Until then that teacher had no idea that it is customary to remove shoes
when you enter a home or school in Japan.
Paula’s teaching of Japanese has enthused her students, raised the profile of her potentially slower
class, taught her colleagues something about Japanese culture and languages are becoming an
integral part of education at Hereworth School.