Keynote Presentation
Bilingual Immersion
Huntingdale PS
Monica Scully
This presentation was part of the 2011 DEECD Innovation Showcase on 13 May.
Good morning. I’m Monica Scully, and that is my school.
Four years ago I was asked to be acting principal and when I arrived at the school for the
first time, I took one look at the buildings and thought, ‘thank goodness it’s only for a term’.
But within two days I knew that I had come across the most extraordinary and innovative
educational setting. Leading the school on a pathway of continuous improvement would
require rethinking ways of accessing resources and looking globally at bilingual school
models.
And at its very core it would challenge my own personal beliefs about language and
learning, linguistic and cultural diversity. The significant research showing that learning in
any second language enhances learning in a first language, our challenge was that our
NAPLAN data and internal data did not reflect that. The Japanese Immersion Program also
seemed to run almost separately to the rest of the school with very little data and
documentation. And at a personal level, did I really believe that teaching children for 30% of
their day in Japanese would really improve their English literacy?
Our first step was to create a leadership position in curriculum design and differentiation,
under which all of our practices would develop.
We built collaborative teams and a
reflective practice culture. We took the huge amounts of tacit knowledge that sat around the
teaching of Japanese language over the past 12 years and articulated it and documented it
in the Early Years Frameworks, applying all the rigour and accountability of that program,
including developing assessment tasks and benchmarking tools for a character-based
language.
We wondered for our children: What did a day in our school look like, feel like, sound like?
And from that we made some significant organisational changes.
We changed our
timetable, so that the children always had a minimum of two hours in each language and
that promoted deeper learning. We created partner teams for the classes and that gave the
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Japanese language teachers greater ownership of the children, and the opportunity to build
those deep relationships, which is really important in little children’s learning. And we began
to align our literacy practice so if the English literacy teacher was looking at persuasive text
that term, the Japanese literacy teacher would also do that and the same for the Thinking
Skills and the ICT Skills.
But our most significant improvement came when we began to research how the bilingual
brain actually acquires knowledge, and the iceberg is a wonderful analogy. On the surface
you see two separate languages, but underneath is the one language motor. And learning
in a second, third and subsequent language actually enhances the capacity of that motor.
But when a bilingual learner reads, they rely very heavily on the language structure cues
and not on the meaning cues, and that explained our data. Our children were really good at
writing, grammar and spelling, but not so in reading comprehension. We began to explicitly
teach comprehension strategies, and that made such a difference, that was our missing link,
and yes, I now believe that teaching in a second language did enhance teaching in a first
language.
By this stage we were seen as leaders in our field and that weighed very heavily on us, that
responsibility, so this year we have a team of both English and Japanese literacy teachers
participating in the Bastow Institute of Literacy Trainers Coaching Program, to build our
knowledge base around bilingual pedagogy. A High Performing Principal’s project enabled
me to look globally for the optimum bilingual school model.
Only to discover that there is no such thing. The bilingual models emerged from the social
political context of those countries, and more importantly the beliefs and values around
linguistic and cultural diversity. In America I got the impression that language was seen as a
problem and something that needed to be overcome in the goal of the acquisition of English
language.
In Canada they have amazing immersion programs, but the languages are
treated very separately, and there is a lot of structure and rules and resourcing around
those programs.
And there was beautiful Finland, where they had such a relaxed attitude to languages, the
more the better, preferably mother tongue plus two, and they adopt an approach that sat
somewhere between our LOTE programs and our immersion programs known as CLIL,
which is Content Language Integrated Learning.
And all that meant is that you teach
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through the language as well as the language itself, so as well as LOTE you would teach
PE in that language or you would teach art in that language or you would teach science.
Many of our children have no exposure to Japanese before they come to school. They see it
as so very natural to learn in two languages, but our greatest feedback comes from a
parent: as one father wrote, ‘As a parent you choose what gifts you give your child. I bring
my children to Huntingdale to give them the gift of language’. In the first two years I was at
the school I was in awe of the children’s linguistic ability and I still am. But it almost fades
into the background when you consider the deep inter cultural knowledge they acquire.
Toma Cole is another one of our parents, she has been a parent for about 5 or 6 years and
she is now a staff member. She is in the audience today and she is prepared to share her
story with you. She was in my office one afternoon and I spontaneously asked her about
her impression - what was the impact of her children attending Huntingdale Primary School?
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When we first came to Australia, they had limited English so they went to language
school, but that they tried so hard to fit in that they even tried to hide their
background, they were so embarrassed to speak their own language in public.
And so then we came here to Huntingdale, and they’re so open to other cultures
that it’s just the kids are so different, there’s Koreans, there’s Japanese, you know,
every students with different backgrounds have got identity, and they can be
themselves and then learn together so, and my kids I think it helps being at a
bilingual school, helped my kids to be themselves and they can be a Japanese
background student here and they’re happy to bring their own food instead of
sandwiches. When my son was in an English school they were taking sandwiches
because they were so embarrassed about their Japanese food but when they
came here they can bring in anything they want to eat because they are happy
and not embarrassed about being different, so I thought this is very, very nice.
And then so and if you know different culture and then it helps them to understand
other culture like Korea, Africa whatever, they just understand being different is ok.
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So, what would be the main take-aways from our experience at Huntingdale? The main
treasures?
And the first one would be that language, identity and culture count.
As
educators we need to advocate for mother tongue; you cannot separate the child from their
language, their language from their culture, their culture from their family. If we reject or
dismiss their language we reject all of the above.
We risk the atrophy of already
sophisticated language skills and reduce the transfer benefits between languages, and a
must-read is the unpolished gem of Alice who grows up in Australia and is educated in
Melbourne, and the poignancy of the teenage Alice who no longer has enough mother
tongue to communicate with her mother.
The second one is that it’s not the bilingual model that is important. All forms of bilingual
education are important; it’s the quality of the teaching and learning.
That the secret to a successful language program is enhancing student engagement, so at
Huntingdale we have moved away from the traditional
LOTE of methodology, in our
language program to using Australian pedagogy.
Finally, as principals we are already instructional literacy leaders - we can lead language
programs exceptionally. Teachers are extraordinary in Victoria, and they have access to
high levels of differentiation and visionary thinking and ICT skills. Bilingual eduction, in its
plethora forms, has the potential of being a transformative school practice giving us new
ways to stimulate and challenge children, and new ways for children to engage in and be
within this new global world. Just as Apple has taken high-end technology and made it
simple to use, at Huntingdale we’ve tried to take away some of the complexity and mystery
around our language learning.
So the question now is that as educators, do we believe linguistic and cultural diversity is a
problem to be overcome, or do we really believe linguistic and cultural diversity is a
resource? For your beliefs and our system beliefs will determine our actions.
What if the Huntingdale experience was the norm and not the exception, what would our
schools and communities look like, feel like, sound like?
Arigato.
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End of presentation.
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