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

1. The shape of Languages in the Australian Curriculum: what’s the hope? AFMLTA Conference Darwin 6 - 9 July 2011 Angela Scarino Research Centre for Languages and Cultures University of South Australia Email: angela.scarino@unisa.edu.au Angela Scarino

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4. Outline • Opening themes • Context and process of development • Making the curriculum • Re-framing the languages curriculum • An example – translation • Closing themes: hopes Angela Scarino

5. Opening themes Angela Scarino • 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 questioning old  new histories meanings reciprocal understanding

6. Context and process of development • 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 Angela Scarino

7. ACARA Languages learning area – development Learning Area Shape paper Subject curricula All learning areas Procedures and guidelines Languages Shape paper Language-specific curricula Languages Framework for Australian Languages Languages Shape paper Language specific curriculum development by state/ territory jurisdictions Australian Languages For all program-types aims, rationale, content descriptions, achievement standards Some examples of how this is realised in specific languages for each program-type Angela Scarino

8. Making the curriculum – the state, the press as players The Age June 29, 2011 Angela Scarino

9. Making the curriculum – the learner The Age June 29, 2011 Angela Scarino

10. 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 Angela Scarino

11. Making the curriculum - consultation feedback - 2 Angela Scarino 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

12. Making the curriculum - consultation feedback - 3 Angela Scarino

13. Making the curriculum - consultation feedback - 4 Angela Scarino

14. Student letters Angela Scarino

15. Student letters Angela Scarino

16. Questioning the nature of curriculum Angela Scarino “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”, as a description of practice interpreted, as understanding knowledge and skills to be developed(see Goodson 1997, Gallagher 1992, Pinar 2003)

17. A curriculum for languages education Angela Scarino • 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

18. Re-framing the languages curriculum: beyond CLT Angela Scarino • 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

19. Expanding the construct - 1 Angela Scarino 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)

20. Expanding the construct - 2 Kramsch: in teaching and learning any language the focus is on teaching and learning meaning communicative  interactional  symbolic competence 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” (Blake & Kramsch, 2007: 282) Angela Scarino

21. Reciprocating 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 Angela Scarino

22. Reciprocating 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) Angela Scarino

23. Reciprocating in understanding Angela Scarino • 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)

24. An example - Year 10 Chinese: Examining translation Angela Scarino Learner group - all girls school - 11 students; 7 had travelled recently to China Established program Experienced teacher

25. Chinese Translation Angela Scarino 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

26. Some of the texts Angela Scarino

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33. Translation task Angela Scarino

34. Translation task Angela Scarino

35. One of the reflections Angela Scarino (1) (2) (3)

36. Discussion Angela Scarino • Noticing, comparing, reflecting, interacting • Communicating, understanding, reciprocating

37. Closing themes: hopes Angela Scarino 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

38. References Angela Scarino 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 Education Pinar, 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.

39. Angela Scarino 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.com http://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