Global Thinkers
Article written by Tracy Fielder, Head of Junior School, Taylors Lakes Campus
It was with great excitement last Friday that 48 Year 3 students from across the two Junior Schools went to Ruyton Girls’ School to compete in the 2017 Primary Chinese Talents Competition. There were 14 teams in total competing and the standard was very high. The competition involved the students performing a musical item totally in Mandarin. The 25 Keilor Campus students performed a song and role play based on the life cycle of a frog and the 23 Taylors Lakes students performed a rap song about the water cycle. The outstanding performances were a credit to the students and their Mandarin teachers Grace Wen (Taylors Lakes Campus) Abbey Liu and Dan Lu (Keilor Campus). The students confidently performed to a large audience and the results were evidence of the hard work and exceptional program they take part in on a daily basis at school.
Results:
Keilor Campus - Encouragement Award
Taylors Lakes Campus - Overall Best Performance
The staff and students could not be more pleased with such high results, especially considering the majority of students they competed against were of a Year 5 and 6 level. This is most certainly evidence of the quality of Mandarin Program we offer at Overnewton.
The students currently in Year 3 were our foundation students for the launch of the Overnewton CLIL Mandarin Program when they were in Prep in 2014. Since this time, we have built on the Program to offer this specialised approach to language learning from Prep to Year 3, and in 2018, all Junior School students across both campuses will have daily lessons taught purely in Mandarin. The excitement then builds as in 2019, the Program will continue on into Middle School.
CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) is a specialised approach to teaching a language through a content area. For our Junior School students, this means the teaching and learning of the Science content through instruction in Mandarin. In a CLIL classroom there is no English spoken and the students learn the curriculum with their expert Chinese teacher.
Both linguists and neuroscientists suggest that learning a second language is far easier for young children. It offers development of higher order thinking skills at an earlier age and a depth of knowledge and understanding beyond the norm, which is then transferrable in other learning domains. Our Prep, Year 1 and Year 2 students are currently exposed to a 25 minuteformal Mandarin lesson each day through the CLIL approach, with an additional 50 minutes each week being provided to Year 3 students, and their achievements are exceptional. It has been noted by experts in this field, that our Overnewton students pronounce the language with a more authentic‘native accent’ and tone due to the exposure of Mandarin on a daily basis at such a young age. This has been an extraordinarily success program for our students since its inception at Overnewton.
As we take on the new direction through the College with the launch of the Strategic Plan (‘Taking the Alpha Generation to Excellence’), the inclusion of the CLIL program is an extremely important aspect of our future. The Strategic Plan states;
Our students need to be prepared for a world in which people work with others of diverse cultural origins, and appreciate different ideas, perspectives and values; a world in which we need to develop trust to collaborate across such differences; and a world in which people’s lives will be affected by issues that transcend national boundaries.
It goes on to state that Overnewton will;
Provide each student with an academic program that enables them to be an empowered, global innovative thinker who is able to construct knowledge in a collaborative way.
Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is at the forefront of the Overnewton languages strategy, as well as one of our most prominent approaches to support the building of Ethical and Compassionate Global thinkers; another aspect of the College future direction. With the strength of a language being taught through a content area, we are supporting our students not only to communicate in another language but to also build global competency. This includes the knowledge and skills to help our students understand the world in which they live. Global competencies are also the attitudinal and ethical dispositions that make it possible to interact peacefully, respectfully and productively with others from diverse geographies.
The definition of global competency includes three interdependent dimensions which we could call the three A's of globalisation:
- the affective dimension
- the action dimension
- the academic dimension
The 3-A framework can be briefly summarised as follows:
•Affective:A positive disposition towards cultural difference and a framework of global values to engage difference.
•Action:An ability to speak, understand, and think in languages in addition to the dominant language in the country in which people are born.
•Academic: Deep knowledge and understanding of the world and a capacity to think critically and creatively about the complexity of current global challenges.
(Reimers 2009)
These are all significant and relevant aspects of education moving forward in the modern world. Our Overnewton students will continue to be ‘lifted’ from standard learning opportunities to those that take them into the future with the language and cultural awareness of one of our most prominent neighbours.
With China being one of the world’s strongest economies, and with its vast development it will have a continued and significant impact on Australia. Research states that, in the future, we need more people to speak Chinese and understand the culture to share the prosperity from a deeper and broader engagement with China. The CLIL program at Overnewton, in many ways, provides this for our students as we move with them into an ever changing world, preparing them to be global citizens with the skills they require to prepare them for the future of possibilities ahead.