… don’t let your child be the one that’s left behind!
With the recent release of the ACARA REPORT on the shape of the Australian Curriculum: Languages, and with more than 1100 preschools applying for only 40 places for the Australian Government’s Early Learning Languages Australia (ELLA) trial in 2015, it’s clear that there is a renewed focus and desire across Australia, to encourage students to learn a second language.
The experts have long been expounding a powerful argument for the benefits of learning another language and the draft ACARA report states that learning another language has been shown to extend students’ intellectual and analytical capabilities and strengthen their cognitive and general learning capabilities, such as creative and critical thinking.
The ELLA trial is part of a wider push by the government to promote languages in schools and to set kids on the path to languages and provide them with a head start towards language study at school.
Research shows that learning languages develops children’s overall literacy, strengthening literacy-related capabilities that are transferable across many learning areas.
Learning a second language can improve student knowledge of concepts across the entire curriculum and enhances their employment and future career prospects.
Download and Print out some FUN Christmas Greeting tags in different languages to put on your pressies this Xmas!
ASK what it means to be a global citizen and you will get a plethora of different answers from whatever source you choose. And if like us, you use Google, well then “About 24,500,000 results in 0.31 seconds” to be precise!
From “the idea of embracing an international perspective and lifestyle” (The World Economic Forum) to “someone who identifies with being part of an emerging world community and whose actions contribute to building this community’s values and practices” (Global Citizens Initiative), the definitions abound!
Global Citizenship, that is a sense of solidarity between citizens across the world, is increasingly important in today’s society. And is about more than simply acquiring a set of skills; it’s about a lifelong process, a way of “being” in the world.
For many people, regrets are a simple fact of life, but there’s one that seems to crop up time and again: language learning.
It seems that as we grow older, many of us can start to regret having not learned a foreign language when we had the chance. If you need a great example of this, billionaire software mogul Bill Gates recently said that he wishes he’d learned French, Arabic or Chinese. So it really is something that affects all of us – even the global elite! One of the best ways to avoid this particular regret, and to have the best chance of mastering a language, is to start early. So let’s look at why learning French or Spanish at primary school age with LCF Fun Languages can be a fantastic ‘no regrets’ approach to bilingualism.
Global Citizenship is increasingly important in today’s society and preparing our children by giving them the opportunities and tools that will enable them to succeed in a global environment – one that is thoroughly connected by modern technology, and economically, socially and politically interdependent – is one of the best ways we can equip them for this interconnected future.
So, the question is, “What does that preparation entail?”
One of the central tenets of global citizenship is Global Citizenship Education (GCED).
In today’s globalised society, our kids will benefit immensely from the ability to communicate and work with a wide variety of people from diverse backgrounds, all with varying perspectives and experiences. And since a classroom is in effect a microcosm of a larger world, and one in which we see a lot of diversity of gender, ethnicity and language, it provides a perfect starting point for creating “global competence”.
The overarching requirement of GCED is, first and foremost, to inspire in our children a curiosity of the world and to instil an awareness of, and appreciation for, people across different cultures and in other countries around the globe. We must teach our children not only to understand these cultural differences but to also embrace them.
