Languages Other Than English
Introduction
Languages Other Than English (LOTE) contribute materially to the universal purposes of schooling and to the development of skills in thinking and reflection. They support the moral, social and economic initiation of young people into the culture and wider civilisation that surrounds them. Learning a language nurtures reflective, deep and creative thinking in specific ways, cultivates culturally distinctive fields of knowledge, and stimulates awareness of intellectual functioning. In unique ways, languages require learners to engage in self-reflection because effective communication in a new language requires the learner to move outside the norms, practices and acquired behaviours of their first language.
Languages infuse the entire curriculum with both taught and incidental insights into how knowledge is organised by different sociocultural communities, and introduce awareness of important distinctions in meaning, sound, and sound patterns, social arrangements, order and sequencing of information, categories and relations. These skills can directly enhance the general intellectual development of young people.
In learning a language, students develop communication skills and knowledge and come to understand social, historical, familial relationships and other aspects of the specific language and culture of the speakers of the language they are studying. Learners are also provided with the tools, through comparison and reflection, to understand language, culture and humanity in a broad sense. In this way, language learning contributes to the development of interculturally aware citizens, of increasing importance at a time of rapid and deep globalisation.
Structure of the domain
The LOTE domain is organised into two pathways, the first consisting of six levels and the second of two levels. Each level includes a learning focus statement and, from Level 4 onwards, a set of standards organised by dimension.
Pathways
As students may begin their LOTE studies at different stages, learning focus statements and standards are offered for two pathways which recognise the student’s point of entry into the study:
Pathway 1: for students who begin learning a language in primary school and continue to study the same language to Year 10.
Pathway 2: for students who begin learning a language in Year 7.
Learning focus
Learning focus statements are written for each level. These outline the learning that students need to focus on if they are to progress in the domain and achieve the standards at the levels where they apply. They suggest appropriate learning experiences from which teachers can draw to develop relevant teaching and learning activities.
Standards
Standards define what students should know and be able to do at different levels and are written for each dimension.
In LOTE standards are introduced for assessment and reporting at Level 4. While it is clear that students gain most benefit from the study of another language when they begin this study in the early years, it is acknowledged that some schools choose to maximise the effect of their resources by introducing LOTE programs at different year levels with appropriate time allocations. In recognition of the cumulative nature of language learning, the LOTE domain includes progression measures which provide a typical sequence of second language development leading to Level 4. Regardless of the level at which the study of a language other than English is introduced, students will need to develop the knowledge and skills described in the progression measures before they attempt the learning associated with the Level 4 standards. These progression measures also assist schools that provide LOTE programs prior to Years 5 and 6 to assess and report effectively on student achievement.
Standards relevant to each of the language categories appear beside an icon (see language categories below) from Level 4 onwards.
Language categories
For the purposes of organising the learning demands on students, languages can be broadly grouped into five categories:
Roman alphabetical languages
Non-Roman alphabetical languages
Character languages
Sign language
Classical languages
Standards in the Communicating in a language other than English dimension include an initial section common to all language categories and additional standards specific to the language categories. From Level 4, the standards in the language categories focus on reading and writing skills. For Classical languages, the complete standard is provided in the language category description.
Dimensions
This domain has two dimensions:
- Communicating in a language other than English
- Intercultural knowledge and language awareness.
The two dimensions of the LOTE domain are intimately linked. Communicating in a language other than English allows learners to reflect on language as a system and gain cultural insight. In turn, Intercultural knowledge and language awareness can provide cultural guidelines for effective communication.
Communicating in a language other than English
In the Communicating in a language other than English dimension, students learn the knowledge, skills and behaviours relevant to the specific language being studied. The skills of this dimension include listening, speaking, reading, viewing, writing, and the use of body language, visual cues and signs. The application of these skills requires knowledge of linguistic elements, including vocabulary and grammar. This dimension requires familiarity with a wide variety of texts and genres in print and electronic form.
Intercultural knowledge and language awareness
Communication skills in a language other than English foster intercultural knowledge and awareness of language as a system. The Intercultural knowledge and language awareness dimension develops students’ knowledge of the connections between language and culture, and how culture is embedded throughout the communication system. Progress through this dimension is demonstrated through performance in the language being studied. The understandings are universal and are gained by comparing languages, including English.
Students gain an awareness of the influence of culture in the learner’s own life and first language. Different languages and language communities organise social relations and information in different ways and values differ from one community to another. Through cultural self-awareness, the ability to rationally discuss and compare cultural differences is developed. This dimension involves developing curiosity about and openness to a variety of values and practices, as well as acquiring in-depth knowledge of the diverse cultural traditions of the source societies.
Transition
Studies of LOTE are offered in a range of ways in schools. While studying one language other than English from Prep to the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) is ideal, some students change languages in the transition from primary to secondary schooling.
The development of the knowledge and skills acquired in the Intercultural knowledge and language awareness dimension is cumulative and continuity is maintained despite any change in the language studied. However, the Communicating in a language other than English dimension relates directly to knowledge and skills in a specific language.
Background speakers
Many students bring an in-depth knowledge of another language to the classroom. Some of these students will have a language other than English as their first language and others may have lived in a country where the language is spoken. These students may progress more rapidly through some aspects of the standards in one or both dimensions.
Stages of learning
The VELS take account of the developmental stages of learning young people experience at school. While student learning is a continuum and different students develop at different rates, they broadly progress through three stages of learning. General statements about characteristics of learners in these three stages are available at Stages of learning.
The following statements describe ways in which these characteristics relate to learning experiences and standards in each of the three stages of learning in the LOTE domain.
Although some of the processes that we use to learn our first language, or mother tongue, are involved in learning a second language, there are also considerable differences. For most children, the mother tongue is learned within a family, where many people are involved in making clear the connection between sounds and actions, messages and basic needs. For a child’s first language, the input is continuous and full time, much of it is adjusted to the child’s needs, and the child’s efforts at communicating are acknowledged, guided and accepted.
A second-language learner already knows the essential functions of voice or signed communication, and how language is involved, when engaging in meaningful activities. The learning usually occurs at school with far fewer providers offering input, for far less time, and shared by many more learners. The providers tend to be adults rather than people of all ages, the learners tend to be of similar ages, the relationships are professional rather than intimate, and the input is restricted in time, quantity, meaning, and personal significance for the learners.
Years Prep to 4 – Laying the foundations
In the earliest years of learning a second language, some processes and sequences are similar to those involved in first language acquisition. Language is adapted to students’ direct needs. Ideally, students are immersed in communication tasks that are engaging, relevant, well designed and directly linked to their general learning experiences.
A second language makes its own specific cognitive, behavioural and emotional demands on, and contributions to, the development of the learner. Students detach from the intimacy of family and connect with teachers and fellow students. The new social world of the second-language classroom requires students to adapt from self expression in the mother tongue to the new norms and practices of the target language. The cognitive demands on the learner are significant. Learners need to transfer to a new communication code their only recently acquired skills as social beings and are required to learn the distinctive rules and conventions of the target language.
Students will notice a contrast between the two language systems. They will notice various culturally specific ways in which meaning is constructed and conveyed in the target language. As speaking and listening come before reading and writing, the foundational processes of learning a second language will ideally immerse students in concrete oral communication activities. The focus of these tasks should be on ‘getting things done’ – in music, drama, dance, drawing and painting, physical activity and early science or number experimentation – rather than language. Continual immersion in the target language for activities in which naturalistic communication prevails minimises the chance that students will continually translate. However, while teachers will use only the target language for activities, they will accept all forms of communication from students – communication in English, code-mixing between the target language and English, and the use of other languages, mime, gesture and so on. By modelling only correct forms of the target language, the teacher’s language becomes the key source of input for students’ growing ability to discern and use the target language for classroom communication. Students need to gain ‘procedural language’ early so that they and the teacher will share a communication code for all classroom activities.
For students of a language with close connections to English, and a similar alphabetic writing system, these years also make bridges between students’ evolving literacy in English and their growing familiarity with the writing system of the target language. For students of target languages that are familiar from the home, the connection between the sounds and symbols of the target language is a valuable resource. For learners of a language whose writing system is unlike that of English, this foundational stage of learning needs to build on noticing differences between the two writing systems.
In Prep to Year 4, all areas of the curriculum can support the learning of a second language other than English; such study reinforces, extends and enriches all other learning. All teachers can make a direct and powerful connection establishing confident early literacy practices between English and the language other than English. Becoming literate helps students realise that language has form and structure as well as meaning. The study of a second language at school bolsters this important insight and helps students to extend and deepen their overall literacy. Learning a second language can show students that the conventions of writing and speaking in any language are arbitrary – the result of choices that have been made.
Through communication, students begin to recognise a range of expressions, greetings, and other formulaic language for routine interactions with people, and notice that these vary according to the participants. Much of this communication is scaffolded and prompted by the teacher, and related to concrete experiences in the classroom.
In all the practices described above, the two dimensions of the domain – Communicating in a language other than English and Intercultural knowledge and language awareness – are integrated with the entire range of learning experiences of students between Prep and Year 4.
Years 5 to 8 – Building breadth and depth
Years 5 to 8 encompass the transition from childhood to adolescence. This is a critical and challenging period for students and teachers. Emotionally, it can be a difficult time for students and it can have particular effects and challenges for second language study. In LOTE, this stage of learning comprises two distinct phases and contains the traditional period of second-language teaching in our school system.
In the first phase (Years 5 and 6) – essentially an extension of the first stage of learning – students extend in depth and breadth the words, expressions, texts, ideas, relationships and activities they know of the second language.
In the second phase (Years 7 and 8), although the nature and level of teacher scaffolding and prompting is reduced and students are now encouraged to interact, directly or through various media, with a range of speakers of the target language, the essential process is similar. However, this second phase is qualitatively different. The onset of puberty affects students’ emotional lives, and the maturational and physical changes involved often have deep consequences for identity, relationships, motivation, behaviour and cognitive development. Such changes, stressful but exciting, coincide with more overt standards being expected of students, an unfamiliar subject division in the curriculum, and a significant change in the institutional operating arrangements of schooling.
Years 7 and 8 are also a challenge for teachers and schools, and specific planning and collaboration across schools to ensure that Pathway 1 and Pathway 2 students are catered for. Pathway 1 students – those who are continuing with languages studied at primary school – need to have their prior study acknowledged and recognised; Pathway 2 students are those who take up languages for the first time at Year 7, or who change from the language they studied at primary school. The many changes that characterise Years 5 to 8 have an impact on teaching too; activities that younger students find enjoyable, such as playing with the sounds and communication style of a new language, might represent a problem for those experiencing difficulties in the process of transition to adolescence.
Primary and secondary schools should collaborate closely to ease the transition between primary and secondary language study. Students should be able to see continuity in the outlines of the programs and what is taught, and see how their demonstrated achievement of the standards at one level articulates with the teaching and learning practices at another level.
At this stage, students begin to initiate communication and follow personal interests and ideas. Communication activities that acknowledge the sharpening individuality of students, and the more subject-divided basis of the curriculum, become more important in second-language teaching, as do connections to other domains, access to a wider range of interlocutors (such as native speakers and other students of similar age), and direct or virtual communication.
Years 9 to 10 – Developing pathways
During this stage, students begin to explore the implications and possibilities of languages other than English for further study, career and citizenship. This growth in personal responsibility is reflected in the increased stakes involved and the choices that they make, impact in important ways on the study of languages.
As more cognitively mature learners, students increasingly make explicit choices with longer term consequences, and teachers and schools are called on to connect the study of languages other than English to all fields of relevance for them – their future pathways of study, their likely or possible careers, and their engagement in the world of civic life and responsibility.
Making such links to these fields, requires an explicit effort by students to understand the multicultural and multilingual nature of Australian society, and a world that is globalising and highly mobile. Teachers can anticipate these requirements by selecting texts, activities and domains that draw on the contexts in which languages other than English are used in Australian society, including the many study and occupational fields in which a second language is useful, locally and globally. Intercultural competence can be seen as a useful practical skill, as well as having value in opening up knowledge of other human societies and national traditions.
National Statements of Learning
The Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) incorporate the opportunities to learn covered in the national Statements of Learning (www.curriculum.edu.au/mceetya/the_statements_of_learning,11893.html). The Statements of Learning describe essential skills, knowledge, understandings and capacities that all young Australians should have the opportunity to learn by the end of Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in English, Mathematics, Science, Civics and Citizenship and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
The Statements of Learning were developed as a means of achieving greater national consistency in curriculum outcomes across the eight Australian states and territories. It was proposed that they be used by state and territory departments or curriculum authorities (their primary audience) to guide the future development of relevant curriculum documents. They were agreed to by all states and territories in August 2006.
During 2007, the VCAA prepared a detailed map to show how the Statements of Learning are addressed and incorporated in the VELS. In the majority of cases, the VELS learning focus statements incorporate the Statements of Learning. Some Statements of Learning are covered in more than one domain. In some cases, VELS learning focus statements have been elaborated to address elements of the Statements of Learning not previously specified. These elaborations are noted at the end of each learning focus statement.
Pathways to VCE, VCE VET and VCAL
As students approach the end of the compulsory years of schooling they begin to make choices about their preferred areas of and pathways for learning. Students choose studies from the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) or recognised vocational training through either a Vocational Education Training (VET) program or the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL).
Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE)
The VELS are an excellent preparation for the study of languages in Years 11 and 12. At present, there are some 46 language-study choices accredited and available within the VCE. These can be grouped as First Language (e.g. Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean); Second Language (e.g. French, German, Italian, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil, Chinese); Indigenous Languages of Victoria (Revival and Reclamation); Classical Languages (Classical Hebrew, Classical Greek and Latin); and Sign Language (Auslan).
Languages studies at VCE attract bonus points for candidates facilitating higher education entry. The ENTER score used to determine tertiary access, acknowledges language study. Second language study can be a good predictor of a student's ability to pursue a demanding post-compulsory program of study. This is because a second language requires sustained effort over time and as a cumulative subject of study, it is both practical and academic at the same time.
Vocational Education and Training (VET)
A VET in the VCE program combines general VCE studies with vocational training and experience in the workplace. Schools are able to offer senior secondary students programs selected from the range of industry areas approved by the VCAA.
The ability to communicate in a language other than English, together with other skills, may afford opportunities for employment in the fields of interpreting, social services, ethnic affairs, the tourism and hospitality industries, the arts, commerce, technology, science and education. Teachers should encourage learners to identify the many careers in which second language skills are useful.
Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL)
The VCAL is a hands-on option for students in Years 11 and 12. It gives practical work-related experience, as well as literacy and numeracy skills and the opportunity to build personal skills that are important for life and work. It is a recognised senior qualification.
As part of the VCAL learning program, students must participate in community-based projects, voluntary work and/or structured activities that will help develop their self-confidence, teamwork skills and other skills important for life and work.
The VELS provide an excellent foundation and ample opportunities for students to develop the skills required in the VCAL learning program. Languages are a practical skill applied in all areas of life and work in Australia’s multilingual society.
More information about VCE (www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vce)
More information about VET (www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vet)
More information about VCAL (www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/vcal)
Downloads
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Languages Other Than English (LOTE) booklet (
PDF - 330KB)
This booklet includes an introduction to this domain, a description of the structure of the domain, and the learning focus statements and standards at each level.
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Languages Other Than English (LOTE) standards table (Doc - 256KB)
This document provides the standards in this domain in table format to enable quick teacher reference. It includes descriptions of the dimensions and the standards from Levels 1 to 6. It does not include learning focus statements.
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Victorian Essential Learning Standards by Level
Level 1 ( PDF - 702KB)
Level 2 ( PDF - 591KB)
Level 3 ( PDF - 649KB)
Level 4 ( PDF - 751KB)
Level 5 ( PDF - 755KB)
Level 6 ( PDF - 788KB)
These booklets include the information for every domain at the relevant level. Each level publication includes:- the relevant stage of learning statement
- the relevant level statement
- introductions to each of the three strands
- introductions to every domain
- learning focus statements and standards for every domain.
