How Language Is The Key Element For Teaching Language And Literacy

When an educator walks into her classroom for the first time, she needs to be prepared to encounter students that come from a variety of backgrounds. The children will be in different stages of language development, and the educator must accommodate for each of these students. Magruder, Hayslip, Espinosa, and Matera (2013) state, “The US Census Bureau projects that by the 2030s, children whose home language is other than English will increase from roughly 22 percent to 40 percent of the school-age population” (p. 9). This increase in second language learners will cause the educator to accommodate for those needs. Second language learners “need teachers who welcome them and recognize their unique abilities, what they know, and what they need to learn” (Magruder, Hayslip, Espinosa, and Matera, 2013, p. 10).

How does ‘I’m Australian Too’ support language and literacy for children from diverse cultural backgrounds and home languages?

Jaky Troy (2012) mentions, “without knowledge of our language we feel culturally and spiritually diminished.” There are over 250 original languages and majority of indigenous people in Australia belong to one or more of them. Nonetheless majority of them cannot remember or hardly speak it (Troy, 2012). Consequently, many Aboriginals do not speak their languages but rather speak one or more forms of Aboriginal English. This results in Aboriginal students feeling uncomfortable regardless of the amount of good teachers that were there to help them (Troy, 2012). According to (Hanlen, 2002) Aboriginal kids are given next to nothing in terms of learning Western literacy or the English language, resulting in separation from the Mainstream society inevitably leading to marginalisation. When Aboriginal students use Aboriginal English they feel inadequate and inferior. In relation to intelligence, students are said to be or even been given the impression, that they lack and must seek intelligence (Shipp, 2012). Throughout

Additionally, the use of Standard English is a national norm in multicultural countries like Australia. Australia’s language diversity lies in the eighteen percent of people speaking a language other than English at home, including Aboriginal English (forms of English spoken by Aboriginal people). Standard English is a variety or dialect of English that is uniform in formal and informal speech and writing used by the educated, with distinct features of accent, grammar, words and meaning, including voice quality, rhythm and language use (Emmit, Zbaracki, Komesaroff, & Pollock, 2010, p. 40). The purpose of this report is to discuss the role of language in early years (before school) and later years (school attending years) of a child’s life. Halliday (1975). Wilkinson (1982) and Tough (1977) as sited in Fellows (2014) formulated systems to categorise language function. The functions will be highlighted thought out this report, specifically in early stages (before school) and later stages (school attending years). Including the role of language in communication, cultural influences, and the identity of a child and how language can

Supporting a child’s first language with classes run by Aboriginal education worker is likely to lead to better literacy in both languages (Dixon et al., 2012). Learning both the L1 and English are supported in the curriculum through the framework for Aboriginal languages and Torres Strait Islander languages (ACARA, n.d.).

As an ESL instructor, I teach a diverse classroom full of migrants with a variety of backgrounds. It’s as multicultural as a classroom can be! I try to incorporate my students’ cultures into our lessons. After all, everything we know and understand comes from the lens of our culture. Take for example our own education. Think about how much influence our point of view had on our education. Now, how much is our point of view affected by culture? I try to be as culturally responsive as possible. However, I know that there is always room for improvement.

Harrison (2011, p. 90) explains that Aboriginal persons often speak different languages and dialects in the home environment than are used in the school. As a teacher I can improve my practise by maintaining awareness of this difficulty and adjusting learning activities accordingly. For example, by reducing the emphasis on

In the book Exploring Language & Literacy chapter Preschool talks about diverse school, a diverse school is where there is different backgrounds and cultures for an example mexican, black, asian etc. In the book it says “The teachers were interested in learning how to better meet the needs of all the learners.” I think what the teachers do is admiring, to go out of there way to learn about the students cultures and backgrounds to better understand them. It so impressive, by doing this they have a better connection with the children. In their social skills they improve in indicating their needs and understanding else's emotions.

Bilingual education should be mandatory in the Indigenous community as the recommendation 14 claims that “the Commonwealth Government work with state and territory governments to provide adequately resourced bilingual school education programs for Indigenous communities from the earliest years of learning, where the child’s first language is an Indigenous language (traditional or contact) (The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 2012). Australia, as a multicultural nation, holds two aspect of identities to some extent. One is the aspect of national identity and other is about community identity. If Australia strengthen the national identity by encouraging people to speak only national language, it will define more the sense of national

Australia is an ethnically and culturally diverse place enriched with Indigenous culture and history. Australia is a unique and multicultural community, dynamic and diverse in nature. This means that our schools and classrooms are also dynamic, complex and culturally diverse. Teachers in Australian classrooms need to create positive learning environments that engages, nurtures and addresses the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. It has been stated that ‘for students to be fully engaged and reach their educational potential they need to be behaviorally, emotionally and cognitively engaged’. Research has shown that there is a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students’ educational engagement and achievement (Ockenden, L., 2014). In order to help close this gap in Indigenous disadvantage and increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student engagement and achievement, schools and teachers need to build positive, respectful relationships and reduce the use of punishment and suspension (Ockenden, L., 2014). This paper will focus upon how the specific needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners can be met and how positive, respectful relationships can be promoted within a secondary English classroom and beyond.

Despite bilingual education’s apparent successes on paper, the transition from theory to practice determines whether the program will succeed or fail. An evidential reason of why bilingual programs fail in schools, particularly in the Australian context, is that they are treated as transfer bilingual programs, rather than the maintenance model (Harris, 1978). According to Harris (1978), transfer bilingual programs are when the Indigenous language is merely implemented as an efficient way of making students literate in English in

If one learns English by forcing his native tongue out of his life, the struggle to remember his native language can have a drastic impact when it comes to connecting to their non-English speaking family members. A gap grows between older and younger generations of the family, an alienation between both generations who grew up in two different languages. From personal experience, learning English was about talking to everyone in English with no reference of my native language of Tagalog and Pangasinan. As an advocate of bilingual education and a World Language Academy teacher, Jason Mizell states that a bilingual teacher should not be “stripping away [the students’] language, but...building on top of what they already have, and helping them to keep growing” (Carsen). Pushing away a mother language ends up with pushing away respect to a culture, the culture that one’s previous generations have grown up and English-only classes try to outgrow.

In different regions around the world, young children are at home learning languages that differ from the prevailing language used in their extensive social world. When they arrive at school, these children has a different precious resource; there mother tongue-often referred to as L1. Typically, when indigenous and minority language speaking students begin school, they are forced to learn a language of the majority group in order to fit in socially and succeed in their academics. In a majority of schools, these children are thought exclusively in the second language, which is most often English. Although the L1 language is exceedingly common, a majority of school curriculums and programs completely disregard and fail to support the minority language. Moreover, a majority of language policies that inform these programs places no value on the knowledge and cultural backgrounds associated with the linguistic diversity of the dialect children. Research as shown that persistent low academic achievement and early school dropouts are common among these minority children and partly stem from this dialect-insensitive education policies. There is need to recognize that children from diverse cultural backgrounds speak in different dialects and, therefore, there is a necessity to enhance learning for such children while adhering and respecting their cultural diversity (Ball, 2010). This research work thus tries to raise awareness on the need to maintain and promote cultural and

You have probably heard recently about the virulent debate occurring in the United-States concerning the learning of multiple language. In fact, last week the President of America made an official declaration which argued that speaking multiple language was “useless”, the learning of the English language was enough due to its international recognition. In addition some schools in North-America refused to teach foreign languages such as spanish or portuguese. This divides also the nations due to the conflict arising in between these countries, and by restricting students for the sake of fitting in the society, it creates close minded thoughts.

Historically, both teachers and researchers have not been interested in pronunciation, as they have usually focused their effort on grammar and vocabulary. Only at the end of nineteenth century, with the Reform Movement in language teaching, pronunciation received systematic attention (Celce-Murcia et al. 2010; Terrell 2012). Thenceforth, research on L2 phonological instruction has grown, and, with the advent of the Communicative Approach, questions on the matter shifted from “Is it necessary to teach it?” to “What are the best ways to teach it?” With the focus on communication, this approach raised the need to teach both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of the target language in the classroom in order to increase intelligibility and communicability, because, regardless students’ command of the second language grammar, they may still face communication problems if they fall under a threshold level of nonnative pronunciation (Hinofotis and Bailey, 1980).