Resources
The Open Language Portal contains more than 1300 teaching resources in 17 languages that have been created/ shared by Community Languages teachers.
The website provides free access to language specific resources, generic language teaching resources and professional learning information. Community language teachers around the world can contribute to the site by uploading resources via the online submission function.
The resources are all checked for quality and copyright before publishing.
There are resources for:
- Arabic
- Assyrian/Chaldean
- Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese)
- Greek
- Gujarati
- Hindi
- Japanese
- Korean
- Malayalam
- Mandaean
- Marathi
- Persian/Dari
- Punjabi
- Spanish
- Tamil
- Turkish
- Vietnamese
Publicising the activities of community language schools to the broader Australian population can be difficult, and targeting specific language groups is a challenge if they are geographically dispersed.
We have collaborated with a range of language schools to produce a series of videos that promote student and parent involvement in community languages schools.
These videos are aimed at different audiences including:
- younger students
- older students
- parents
- the broader community
Experienced day-school and community-language school teachers have developed scope, sequences and units of work to accompany, complement and align with the new NSW Education Standards Authority K–10 syllabuses in a variety of commonly used community languages.
These include:
Twenty-nine key teachers in NSW primary schools trialled and developed 48 units of work in nine languages for use in Community Languages Schools.
Twenty-five key teachers in the NSW government K–6 Community Languages Program are developing units of work in nine community languages:
Arabic, Assyrian, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Korean, Macedonian, Tamil, Turkish.
The units reflect quality teaching and rich-task outcomes aligned with new K–10 languages syllabuses. Some of these are available at our Open Languages Portal.
Teachers had two days of workshops and received in-school support to trial and evaluate these units with their students.
Participants in the Community Language Teaching (Advanced) Program are extending and adapting these units to another 20 languages in 2020.
We are developing a Passport for Languages to accredit student language learning.
These will be based on detailed languages progressions and teacher professional learning to use these progressions for student assessment.
This project is aiming to develop progressions or scales for community languages that can then be adapted into different versions for community languages.
The progressions/scales will be trialled with groups of students in 2020 to gain evidence for validity and reliability. Community languages teachers will be given professional development to be able to assess student work samples.
The eventual outcome will be an online Passport for Languages that will be a permanent record of the listening, speaking, reading and writing level attained by each student.
This Passport will also include student self-assessment and can be carried across schools and stages of schooling to show evidence of proficiency.
The most common request we recieve from teachers and Community Languages schools is to learn how to use IT in class.
The students are exposed to all forms of technology in mainstream schools and in their daily lives. Gaining skills in technology to engage students is, therefore, the priority for schools.
We undertook a video/ digital storytelling project in the Bonnyrigg Khmer school. Khmer is a smaller and lower-SES community with students who are second and third generation Australians.
Project manager Dr. Kirsty McGeoch trained teachers in digital storytelling and then supported them as they worked with students on a range of projects.
Watch our Digital storytelling videos on YouTube to learn more:
- How the process works (7:24 mins)
- How to make traditional Cambodian beef skewers (2:54 mins)
- Students self-produced films about favourite food and animals (9:56 mins)