Enhancing learning through building on students' and parents' linguistic and cultural repertoires in Year 1 classrooms

Jacqueline D'warte, Paula Daniel, Anjulie Allan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

Abstract

Building on the strengths and addressing the needs of our increasingly diverse student population is a key feature of educational policy and practice, highlighted in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers: Standard 1 which requires teachers to Know students and how they learn: Demonstrate and be responsive to the learning strengths and needs of students from diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014). Planning learning sequences that acknowledge and build on our students’ wide ranging linguistic strengths can prove challenging and despite our best intentions this is often at the margins of everyday classroom work. In this article, we share learning sequences that enabled us to both acknowledge and build on the diverse language strengths and needs of two, Year 1 students and address outcomes in the key learning areas of English, Geography and Mathematics. We worked with two Year 1 classes, a gifted and talented class and a mainstream class of students who together spoke 29 languages and dialects other than English. In these classes, we engaged students in studying the ways they were reading, writing, talking listening and viewing in one or more languages inside and outside of school, and we combined this with an in-class bilingual book reading program (Naqvi et al., 2012) that also built on parents’ and community members’ linguistic repertoires.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)31-34
Number of pages4
JournalPractical Literacy
Volume23
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • education, primary
  • multicultural education
  • Australia

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