Languages Other Than English – Relationships To Other Domains

Introduction

The advice for this section focuses on the relationships between the domains to provide students with multi domain learning opportunities that will help support their deeper understanding of the essential knowledge and skills.

The Arts

Languages invite close collaboration with the Arts. Creating, making, exploring and responding to arts works connects with languages in many ways. Arts education nurtures the reflective, deep and creative thinking required for LOTE and assists students to connect with new languages through broad and systematic experiences. Arts practice provides alternative forms of communication that encourage students to move outside the norms, practices and acquired behaviours of their everyday experience of their first language.

Arts study fosters intercultural knowledge and language awareness. Cultural understanding is enhanced by immersion in the Arts forms of other societies with their implicit and explicit norms, values and beliefs. Studying different cultural forms of different Arts areas brings students to a closer understanding of the performance of social roles and personal behaviours in other cultures. Experiencing the expression of particular societies through the Arts practices of that society assists students to understand what is intrinsic and different between societies as well as that which is shared and understood as common experiences across world. 

Language teaching provides insight into diverse national visual, music and performance traditions and also to the centres of arts innovation and excellence in non-English speaking nations. Arts programs can connect with the languages being taught by schools by choice of art forms, such as Chinese calligraphy, traditional Indian drumming, Islamic decoration, Japanese paper arts, Balinese shadow puppets silk painting, folk-song and other art forms and the discussion of styles, key artists and performers, their lives, and the role and history of arts in the relevant societies.

Civics and Citizenship

Through the study of Languages other than English, students are introduced to other cultures and ways of thinking. They gain an understanding of the way that societies organise themselves; their social, historical and familial relationships, the values underpinning the culture, and the ways people make meaning of their world. Learning a language also requires the learner to move outside the norms, practices and acquired behaviours of their first language and reflect on the differences and similarities between their own and other societies. Students develop the necessary knowledge and skills to reflect on their own society, as well as intercultural awareness. These understandings support the development of citizens who understand and appreciate the diverse cultures in Australian society, including indigenous communities, and our increasingly interconnectedness to a globalising world.

Communication

Communication activities relate to Languages other than English in many ways. Language teachers can draw attention to how language is organised according to diverse communication patterns, such as who may speak to whom, about topics that may be discussed and others that may not, the role and attitude towards silence, and the rules of taking turns to speak and listen in a conversation. Communication teachers can engage learners in activities that highlight different ways of communicating and different specific communication events.

Learners can gain awareness of how better communication can improve relationships between people, how students can be more effective in expressing their views, wishes, feelings and attitudes about issues; how difficult issues can be dealt with sensitively, how disagreement can be conducted amicably, and generally how young people can learn to express themselves, their views, experiences, aspirations and problems effectively.

Teachers can support students from language backgrounds other than English in their ability to communicate effectively with their families where sometimes differential levels of English competence can add extra difficulty to the stress and problems that can arise in normal adolescence. Teachers can help these and other learners to think about the role and place of dialects and their connection to standard languages. Students can learn about social codes of other kinds: how speech and writing vary between various in groups and out groups. Students can compare their own ways to use English and what ‘school English’ is like, how these differ and how they are similar. Projects to find out these differences in the target language can be undertaken by older learners. All students can study the complex multilingual and communication patterns in Indigenous Australia. Communication is not only linguistic, or oral, and so how different cultures have recorded history can be explored, for example, the role of cave painting, the Bayeux Tapestry, how SeaSpeak operates on the seas, Sign Languages and today multimedia texts produced with computers.

Students can make oral and written, multimedia or mixed mode presentations. Students can learn about register, or levels of formality in speech and writing, and the diverse functions and effects of using different registers. These involve communication with strangers, people in authority, intimates, people of a different gender, people the student is seeking to persuade, etc.

Design, Creativity and Technology

In LOTE students develop their understanding of aspects of different cultures, including how people eat and dress. They consider the place of cultural artefacts in society. They extend their knowledge and understanding of cultural diversity. Through linking LOTE and Design, Creativity and Technology students can further develop these understandings by addressing relevant design briefs that require them to apply their knowledge to design situations.

Students can also participate in a range of design and technology activities, such as cooking, (Taste and Smell on the Student Learning February 2006 DVD) games, drawing and puppet making while further developing their language skills.

English

The close study of language is a central concept in the English domain. In English, students develop knowledge about the relationship between texts and the contexts in which they have been created. In LOTE students learn that there are similarities and differences between languages. Literacy in one language complements literacy in other languages. Bilingual literacy often gives learners an insight into how English reading and writing works that they may not gain from English-only literacy. Teaching Languages other than English also supports students who are having difficulty with English literacy because LOTE teachers focus on language and communication in an explicit way.

As students grow in their knowledge of a second language, some achieve high levels of bilingualism, which has been shown in numerous scientific studies to have a direct and beneficial impact on children’s intellectual development. There are two broad pathways to bilingualism in the Australian context. For the majority of population this would involve adding skill in a language other than English to children’s English. For a large and growing number of children, bilingualism involves adding English to home languages. These children are either of immigrant or indigenous origin, but this is also true for those deaf children who are fluent in Australian Sign Language. If schools can support these students to maintain their bilingualism this home skill can become a permanent and very valuable intellectual asset. However, even limited skills in a second language have been shown in many studies to greatly enhance children’s insight into the way language works, and to provide them with ‘meta-linguistic’ skill.

Health and Physical Education

The domains of LOTE and Health and Physical Education (HPE) provide a range of opportunities for linking the curriculum at all levels of the standards. The concepts of movement, dance, physical activity and sports, all vary culturally and are associated with their own specific languages, vocabularies and discourses. All societies have different attitudes, values and beliefs about physical activity, and the many ways in which these are expressed can be integrated with languages study as it explores the social worlds in which the target language is used. Health knowledge and promotion is also rich with possibilities of such connection. Diverse cuisines and cultural beliefs about foods in relation to their health properties are ancient and variable in diverse national traditions. Physical activities, and the use of the body in communication, are also richly connected to languages.

The links between the knowledge and skills in HPE and LOTE provides the opportunity for students to:

• learn about cultural practices, such as the use of right hand only for accepting gifts
• explore the diverse views and theories of movement and diet (for example, herbal treatment theories, auryvedic diets and treatments)
• examine the impact of cultural beliefs on food selection such as beliefs about wine and other foods consumed or avoided for cultural or religious reasons
• seasonal eating and family dining traditions, connections between regional foods and children’s foods and eating traditions
• practice activities/sports with a strong cultural tradition such as tai chi, yoga, soccer and indigenous games
• explore the role of sporting traditions; such as the origins of the Marathon and the ancient Olympics, the Highland Games in Celtic tradition, Asian martial arts based on self-discipline.

The Humanities – Economics

The general intellectual benefits of bilingualism extend to all intellectual functioning and can support learners in their growing economic knowledge, understanding, reasoning or interpretation.

In their focus on other societies, students of languages are taught about societies with particular national economies, and with distinctive traditions of using natural and produced resources and goods, and histories of exchange and transfer, markets and regulation. From traditional trades and occupations, to modern global players, many non-English societies have modelled unique pathways to economic success. With globalisation advancing rapidly there is greater economic interdependence. The Australian economy is linked very closely through trade to all parts of the globe, especially to the Asian region, Europe and North America. In the last 50 years, there has been a major transfer of economic wealth and trading power towards the non-English speaking economies that function in culturally distinctive ways and which use languages other than English.

The case for teaching languages of Australia’s major trading partners brings together languages and economics in some broad ways. Australia’s multicultural community also functions in multiple languages. Job advertisements often include reference to knowledge of a language other than English as an advantage. Tourism is a major industry with strong intercultural and language connections. Language teachers and teachers of business and economics can link languages and economic studies in such ways.

The Humanities – Geography

Languages are relevant to geography due to topographical and place names, to the cultural significance of land forms, to different ways in which geospatial skills and knowledge have evolved over time and to different ways in which these are practiced today.

Geography teachers can support the intercultural knowledge and language awareness dimensions of language study. Language teachers can incorporate activities in the target language that build on and enrich learners’ Geographical knowledge and understanding and their Geospatial skills.

Students can work with actual maps or street directories from cities or countries using the target language. They can learn direction-giving and direction-receiving language. They can learn to calculate distance and relationships between landforms, landmarks and other features of urban and rural settings. They can study cultural and popular ways to talk about space and relationships, such as the arrangement of villages in Bali, or medieval European cities. Students can also gain intercultural knowledge and some vocabulary from the mapping and exploration of Australia, and its near neighbours, such as the role of Dutch, French and Portuguese explorers, the use of French and Latin naming by these explorers. Students should also explore non-European encounters with early Australia – such as the Macassar traders and possible early Chinese encounters with Australia. Students can also make links between languages and geography by studying population distribution, housing and urban patterns and living arrangements in target language countries.

The Humanities – History

Through the study of Languages other then English, students are introduced to other cultures and ways of thinking. They gain an understanding of the way that societies organise themselves; their social, historical and familial relationships, the values underpinning them and the ways they make meaning of their world. Learning a language also requires the learner to move outside the norms, practices and acquired behaviours of their first language and reflect on the differences and similarities between their own and other societies. Students develop knowledge and skills to reflect on their own society as well as intercultural awareness. These understandings support the development of historical understanding and appreciation of the diverse cultures in Australian society and our increasingly interconnected and globalising world. Languages embody diverse national traditions of countries and have often been involved in the formation of national movements, nationalism and also in colonial and post-colonial movements. For example, a society such as East Timor, the world’s newest country, whose history is intimately connected to Australia, has recently adopted a national language policy that reflects the country’s history.

Intercultural knowledge and language awareness for students can be supported by History teachers by drawing attention to the role of languages in history.  Furthermore, projects on multilingualism and globalisation can be taken in the context of reasoning about the world today under the impact of vast population mobility.

Information and Communications Technology

Teachers of languages and teachers of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) share a common interest in the creative, extensive yet critical use of ICT in general, and the multimedia texts made possible by the Internet and various software in particular, can strongly support learners whose cognitive or learning style is more towards the visualiser end of a continuum of learning with visualisation and verbalisation at the two ends.

ICT involves instantaneous worldwide connections allowing the connecting of small and large communities. Via chat groups, and other time specific or time-delayed connections, learners can relate directly to native speakers of the target language (TL). This is an important experience for learners so that they hear, and read, the TL they are learning used naturally by their age peers. In this way learners and speakers of the TL can come into immediate and interactive contact. ICT can be motivating for some learners, experimental and diversifying for others and generally enriching.

Multimedia texts also support the encouragement of multi-literacies which stimulate learners to experiment, to express themselves, to explore and range widely with texts, materials, information, and modes of communication that combine the vast resources of ICT.

Interpersonal Development

Students learn that diverse cultures and the languages that express these cultures influence interpersonal relationships in different ways. These differences are expressed in languages and how communication takes place. Some languages express social relationships in the grammar system, others in how communication is organised.

Topics that can be covered in the teaching of Interpersonal Development that connect with languages include social conventions such as: informal and formal address forms; use of first names, titles and honorifics in several Asian languages; variations in ways to greet and farewell and how these express cultural and national histories and traditions; the concept of FACE and how it operates in politeness in both western and non-western societies; present giving and receiving; what students are expected to do at school (such as differences in expectations about cleaning schools, or caring for classrooms); wearing of uniforms and other insignia to mark individual or group work.

Students can learn about terms that have influenced social relations in English (honour and duelling), or notions in diverse traditions such as silence and wisdom in Confucian teachings, the Greek principle of philotimo and the Italian principle of virtu`, and their equivalents in personal honour in various national traditions.

Mathematics

Common and central to both domains is consideration in language of semantic (meaning of key concepts, ideas, terms) and syntactic (structural relationships in natural and symbolic language) elements and features.

This involves acquiring knowledge of words, symbols, terms and definitions, understanding and application of concepts, and the use of related technical skills. Students develop thinking processes of analysis and synthesis, involving relationships between simple and complex ideas and expressions.

These developments involve the use of mathematics in everyday activities such as number systems in counting, buying and selling, measuring, designing and building, and estimating and describing chance events using different written and spoken languages in a range of social and cultural contexts.

Personal Learning

In Languages other than English, students apply the knowledge, skills and behaviours of Personal Learning to become effective autonomous learners. Students are required to self evaluate and reflect on their learning in order to become proficient users of the language. In this process resiliency is developed. Receiving feedback from teachers, peers and others (including those from the country whose language they are studying) is vital for them developing understandings of the culture and competency of the language. Teaching and learning strategies allow students to use their preferred ways of learning. Students are encouraged to respect individual differences especially as they will be at different stages of learning and competency.

Science

The study of science is dependent on the constructs and conventions of our global society. Intercultural knowledge, language awareness and the conventions of communicating in Languages other than English help students to understand how different cultural perspectives affect people’s approaches to interpreting the world around them and to problem-solving. Studies of language and culture through LOTE provide students with greater insight as to the approaches taken by scientists from diverse cultures in developing conceptual knowledge in science. Students’ use of English and scientific language are also enhanced through LOTE studies.

Global collaborative scientific enterprise is becoming more common in the workplace. The LOTE domain provides perspectives and practices that facilitate appropriate intercultural interactions. Australia is a multicultural society. In Science, students may interact with a variety of people, including Indigenous Australians, whose first language may not be English. Intercultural knowledge and language awareness facilitates communication and help students to gain an understanding of the diverse views held by individuals and communities and the reasons for their beliefs. Views relating to priorities in addressing environmental sustainability, the nuclear energy debate and bioethical issues, for example, may be affected by values held by different communities. Students develop an understanding of cultural diversity and the contributions people from different cultures have made to our scientific knowledge and heritage; they explore the origin of scientific language and conventions, for example, the Arabic, Greek and Latin base of many scientific terms, the origin of the names of many chemical elements, and protocols for naming newly discovered objects; they explore the links between science and culture, for example the relationship between lunar and solar cycles and local festivals, celebrations and agricultural practices. Such understanding may increase their ability to communicate appropriately, in the language of science, with the scientific community to diverse audiences. Opportunities exist for students to work on web-based international collaborative projects gaining insight into how scientists work.

Thinking Processes

Languages can make a positive contribution to all aspects of thinking. As learners gain skill in a second language they come to recognise that any single language is an arbitrary system for representing the world. Bilingualism adds this insight in a unique way.

First it can provide learners with evidence for the different ways that language groups organise and classify knowledge, the diverse grammatical properties of different languages that indicate how thinking is impacted on the way different groups name the world and classify experience.

Bilingualism enhances thinking skills in several ways. Research has shown that learners who gain a high level of skill in two languages gain advantages in various kinds of thinking. Convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and meta-linguistic awareness are stimulated directly by high-level language skills. Even lower levels of language skill, and in some cases the mere study of a second language, can assist learners with early reading, with reasoning and with reflection. This is because language is always intimately connected to thinking.