The shape of Languages in the The shape of Languages in the Australian Curriculum: what’s the hope?Australian Curriculum: what’s the hope?

AFMLTA ConferenceDarwin6 - 9 July 2011

Angela ScarinoResearch Centre for Languages and CulturesUniversity of South AustraliaEmail: angela.scarino@unisa.edu.au

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Outline

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• Opening themes

• Context and process of development

• Making the curriculum

• Re-framing the languages curriculum

• An example – translation

• Closing themes: hopes

• Questioning the nature of curriculum and curriculum making

• Honouring the learners and their linguistic and cultural diversity

• Reconsidering language, culture, learning and their interrelationship attention to the interpretation and making of meaning reciprocating

• Experimentation in teaching, learning and assessment

• Reflexive process: acting reflecting

questioningold newhistoriesmeaningsreciprocal understanding

Opening themesOpening themes

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Context and process of Context and process of developmentdevelopment

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The Melbourne Declaration languages included: “especially Asian languages” a national curriculum is signalled

Consultation on the draft Shape of the Australian Curriculum: Languages

national forum (October 2010) widespread consultation (January-April 2011) revision process (April-July 2011)

Curriculum development procedures and guidelines ( August 2011) commencement of writing: broad outline, then detail (

September onwards) national consultation and trialling next phase of writing, consultation, trialling, re-writing

ACARA Languages learning area – developmentACARA Languages learning area – development

Learning Area

Shape paper

Languages Shape paper

Languages Shape paper

Subject curricula

Procedures and

guidelines

Language-specific curricula

Framework for

Australian Languages

Some examples of how this is realised

in specific languages for each

program-type

Language specific

curriculum development

by state/territory

jurisdictions

All learning areas

Languages

Australian Languages

For all program-types

aims, rationale, content

descriptions, achievement

standardsAngela Scarino 7

Making the curriculum – the state, the press Making the curriculum – the state, the press as playersas players

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The Age June 29, 2011

Making the curriculum – the learnerMaking the curriculum – the learner

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The Age June 29, 2011

Making the curriculum - consultation feedback - 1

Key strengths:

•The strong positioning of languages within school education•The development of language-specific curricula•The strong positioning of Australian Languages•Recognition of the diversity of language learners and pathways•The rationale for learning languages•Key concepts and understandings in learning languages•The aims of learning a language•The nature of knowledge, skills and understanding in learning a language•The discussion of general capabilities

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Key issues:

•Indicative hours•Selection of languages and pathways for development

•The staging of language-specific curriculum development

•‘Home user’ learner category

•‘Reciprocating’ 

•Expectations of the shape paper

•Implementation and policy issues e.g. national languages policy, teacher supply and professional development, eligibility

Making the curriculum - consultation feedback - 2

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Making the curriculum - consultation feedback - 3

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Making the curriculum - consultation feedback - 4

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Student lettersStudent letters

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Student letters

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“A curriculum is an attempt to communicate the essential principles and features of an educational proposal in such a form that it is open to critical scrutiny and capable of effective translation to practice.” (Stenhouse 1975:4)

Curriculum documents, like musical scores, must be enacted and performance always involves interpretation. Two performances of the same score may be quite different. (Schrag, 1992:277)

Six curriculum ideologies (and their assumptions, values, views about education): religious orthodoxy, rational humanism, progressivism, critical theory, reconceptualism, and cognitive pluralism.(Eisner, 1992:306)

curriculum as fact; curriculum as curriculum as “lived”, asa description of practice interpreted, as understandingknowledge and skills

to be developed (see Goodson 1997, Gallagher 1992, Pinar 2003)

Questioning the nature of curriculumQuestioning the nature of curriculum

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• Structuring the curriculum time-on-task learner background

• The substance of the curriculum: organisation of teaching and learning language language and culture language and learning language and literacy language and knowledge language and identity, lived experience,

imagination within and across languages and cultures

• A monolingual or a plurilingual view of curriculum

A curriculum for languages educationA curriculum for languages education

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• Difficult to define what it means to learn to know another language (Larsen-Freeman and Freeman 2008)

• Communicative language teaching: a theoretical construct, a goal, an approach to pedagogy as interactive, transactional ‘communication’ in the

target language (isolated from social, historical, cultural contexts)

absence of cultural content(?) differing positions: questioning the appropriateness of

the construct itself questioning the restrictive ways in which we have understood it

K-12 frameworks: interface with constructs of ‘proficiency’ and standards (Byrnes 2006, Kramsch 2006)

need to re/frame and expand the construct

Re-framing the languages curriculum: Re-framing the languages curriculum: beyond CLTbeyond CLT

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• An expanding view of language; language as personal, expressive – how we want to be in a language (Shohamy)

• Learning a language is not a monolingual activity as there are always at least two languages at play (Kramsch)

• Language mediates learning – learning to mean (Halliday)

• Language is not only something that we use; we are “at home” in language; to learn a language is to learn an inheritance (Gadamer)

Expanding the construct - 1Expanding the construct - 1

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Expanding the construct - 2Expanding the construct - 2

• Kramsch: in teaching and learning any language the focus is on teaching and learning meaning

communicative interactional symboliccompetence competence competence

(Kramsch 2006, 2009, 2010)

• “The self that is engaged in intercultural communication is a symbolic self that is constituted by symbolic systems like language as well as by systems of thought and their symbolic power. This symbolic self is the most sacred part of our personal and social identity; it demands for its well-being careful positioning, delicate facework, and the ability to frame and re-frame events.

• “The issue of how we understand other peoples’ memories, aspirations and world-news is inseparable from how we understand ourselves”

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ReciprocatingReciprocating

• As an overall theoretical orientation to communication, learning, education

• As a goal of communication and learning – understood as the mutual interpretation and exchange of meaning mutual understanding of self and other world-mindedness, openess, and the ability to connect with difference

• As a ‘driving force’ in communicating and learning – an integral characteristic of the act of communication and of learning

• as experience and reflection on that experience;

• as talk, and talk about talk;

• as language use and exploration/analyses/reflection on use to consider different ways of making meaning

• deeper understanding of self-situatedness, stance, disposition, identity, self –awareness in relation to others

• As a meta-process: knowing why

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Reciprocating in communicationReciprocating in communication

Reciprocating in communication and in learning to communicate, understood as as the exchange of meaning

•meanings emerge from the language being used to communicate, as well as from the experiences, memories, emotions, life-worlds of those who participate in communication•in learning any additional language the learner brings more than one language and culture to the processes of interpreting and making meaning – the process is always in comparison with L1 (2,3,4) and as such it is inherently interlinguistic and intercultural the “movement between” the language being learnt and one’s own means that learning about the other brings learning about oneself•the mutually constitutive process of using and learning language – each use contributes to new learning that comes into play in subsequent use•meaning making as subjective (intrapersonal and intracultural) and intersubjective (interpersonal and intercultural)

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•People bring their own diverse histories of experiences, their own languages and cultures, their ways of seeing the world to the process of coming to understand

•To reach an understanding in dialogue requires a mutual process of making sense of each other’s contribution (the subject matter) and at the same time each other (the person)

Reciprocating in understandingReciprocating in understanding

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• Learner group - all girls school

- 11 students; 7 had travelled recently

to China

• Established program

• Experienced teacher

An example - Year 10 Chinese: Examining translation

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Purpose:•To invite students to “decentre, that is, to see languages and cultures from inside and outside, to show understanding of other’s linguistic/cultural perspectives and to see the new from the inside and the familiar from the outside”.•“The way we communicate impacts on how meaning is interpreted”

Teacher’s framing questions:What are the skills needed for translation?How accurate is on-line translation?How translatable are languages? What is lost in translation?What does it mean to translate interculturally?And how important is this?

A natural context for “moving between” systems of meaning making (see Cook 2010) – a reciprocal relationship

Chinese Translation

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Some of the textsSome of the texts

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Translation task

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Translation task

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(1)

(2)

(3)

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One of the reflectionsOne of the reflections

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•Noticing, comparing, reflecting, interacting

•Communicating, understanding, reciprocating

Discussion

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What difference can the ACARA Australian Curriculum Languages make?

•Contextualise the development in the realities of Australia complex and varied linguistic and cultural landscape “more complex than three groups”

•Honour the learners and their diversity

•Expanding understanding of language, culture and learning

•Reciprocating as a theoretical orientation to communication, language-and-culture-learning, and education meaningful communication; attend to the interpretation and making of meaning; mutual/reciprocal understanding in diversity

•Enriching student learning, achievements and satisfaction

•A culture of questioning, experimenting, learning

•Honour the teachers of languages

Closing themes: hopes

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Blake, R. & Kramsch, C. (2007). Closing remarks. Perspectives Modern Language Journal, 91, 282-.283

Byrnes, H. (2006). Perspectives: Interrogating communicative competence as a framework for collegiate foreign language study. Modern Language Journal, 90, 244-246.

Cook, G. (2010). Translation in language teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Fox, S. & Maughan, J. (2003). Ian W. Abdulla. Adelaide. Wakefield Press.Gadamer, H-G. (1976). Philosophical Hermeneutics. D.E. Linge (editor and translator).

Berkeley: University of California Press.Gallagher, S. (1992) Hermeneutics and education. Albany, N.Y., SUNY Press.Goodson, I.F. (1997). The changing curriculum. Studies in social construction. Studies in the

Postmodern Theory of Education. Vol.18. New York. Peter Lang Publishers.Halliday, M.A.K. (1993). Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and

Education. 4, 93-116.Kramsch, C. (2003). Language acquisition and language socialization: Ecological

perspectives. New York. Continuum.Kramsch, C. (2006). From communicative competence to symbolic competence. Modern

Language Journal. 90, 249-252.Kramsch, C. (2009). The multilingual subject. Oxford. Oxford University Press.Kramsch, C. (2010). The symbolic dimensions of the intercultural. Language Teaching. pp.1-

14. Ortega, L. (2009). Understanding second language acquisition. London. Hodder EducationPinar, W. (2003). Introduction. In W. Pinar (Ed) International Handbook of Curriculum

Research. Mahwah, NJ. Lawrence Erlbaum. pp.1-34.Schrag, F. (1992). Conceptions of knowledge. In P.W. Jackson (Ed) Handbook of Research on

Curriculum. A project of the American Educational Research Association. New York. Macmillan. pp.268-301.

References

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Shohamy, E. (1996). Language testing. Matching assessment procedures with language knowledge. In Birenbaum, M. and Dochy, F. (Eds). Alternatives in assessment of achievements, learning processes and prior knowledge. Boston, MA. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pp.143-159.

Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London. Heinemann Educational Books.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/chinglish www.engrish.comhttp://www.chinglish.de/http://olympics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/lost-in-translation-a-chinese-cheer/

http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2008/07/then-well-grab.html

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