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‘We get to read our favourite stories in new ways.’

A remark made by a Year 3 pupil in response to a unit of work based on Wir gehen auf Bärenjagd! (We’re going on a Bear Hunt), during which pupils had created their own class story, entitled Wir gehen auf Drachenjagd (We’re going on a Dragon Hunt). The collaborative research undertaken and detailed below investigates the embedding of languages using stories to teach and digital storytelling to motivate both teachers and children to engage with German in the primary classroom.

Since June 2018, we, the authors of this blog (Susi Sahmland, Senior Lecturer in Educational Studies and Claire Hackney, Languages Lead and Year 4 class teacher at a Primary School in Brockley), have worked together in what has proved to be a successful collaboration and partnership between a London Primary School and Goldsmiths, University of London.

Beginning by analysing the strong foundations already established in language teaching, in this case focusing on German, the headteacher and language lead (Claire Hackney) wanted to raise the profile of German at the school further and were looking to develop a curriculum bespoke to the school itself. The National Curriculum states that language teaching should ‘enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts’ (DfE, 2013: 1), recognising that pupil creativity as well as engagement is at the heart of language learning and must be promoted in a primary languages classroom.

Through discussions together (lecturer and teacher), team teaching, and presenting our ideas at conferences and workshops, we have been able to continually evaluate our experiences.

Our collaboration has sought to create a curriculum that would develop not only pupils’ confidence when using language, but also their creativity and curiosity. The new languages curriculum builds on an already established literature unit incorporated during the autumn term which uses texts as foundations to underpin the rest of each year group’s curriculum.

Our focus class was a Year 3 class and the story book was Wir gehen auf Bärenjagd (We’re Going on a Bear Hunt) (Rosen & Oxenbury, 2013), which was the central focus for the spring and summer term. The initial autumn term was spent working on vocabulary and themes connected with the stories; the spring term spent closely working on the text itself; and the final summer term on writing a digital story based on the text.

The texts in lower key stages were chosen for their familiarity to the children, as well as the repetitive phrasal structure of the language used, providing context and a connection with their own experiences. The theme and plot of the story allowed pupils to use existing knowledge of adjectives and animal vocabulary and build on this. When the story writing unit was introduced, the majority of pupils were immediately engaged and enthusiastic.

By presenting pupils with a creative outcome to work towards, children were also able to see a wider purpose to language learning. Reaction to using stories throughout the unit’s work and the new structure and content of the curriculum was positive from both pupils and the teachers involved alike. Staff were enthusiastic about using stories to develop children’s language skills and pupils eager to create their own variations on the story too. Teachers and pupils were able to focus on content, as well as context.

Since our initial meetings and collaboration, we have presented our approach to curriculum design at conferences, network meetings and in workshops in the UK and in Germany and we are sharing our ideas on the Future Learn MOOC, which will be live from the 10th May 2021.

You can access our recorded online event entitled ‘Collaboration – Creativity – Curriculum’ which was hosted by the Centre for Language, Culture and Learning in April 2021.

Blog by Susi Sahmland and Claire Hackney

Foreign languages as Cultural Capital: empowering UK students from disadvantaged backgrounds through the learning of Chinese

In the UK, Chinese language teaching has thrived in both independent and state schools as a modern foreign language (MFL). Due to its economic value in the global market and potentially representing a new source of cultural capital, Chinese is particularly important for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is therefore crucial that Chinese provision, as well as pedagogy for teaching Chinese in schools, are well-researched to ensure equal opportunities and high achievement for students.

In 2017, I completed my British Academy Small Grant funded research entitled, ‘Foreign languages as Cultural Capital: empowering UK students from disadvantaged backgrounds through the learning of Chinese’. The research investigated through classroom ethnography (1) whether and how teachers and students considered Chinese to be cultural capital, and (2) what pedagogies in the Chinese MFL class aided learning and ensured equality of achievement.

The study took place in Kingsford Community School, which advanced my previous Goldsmiths Award funded research (2010-2011) entitled, ‘Developing a bilingual pedagogy in the Chinese language class across mainstream and community contexts’. The findings from the two funded research projects have been presented at several international conferences and disseminated through social media such as Chinese Forum, Conversation and Faculty online broadcasting.

The key findings are summarised as follows:

Chinese as a MFL target language (CFL), is difficult and challenging in many ways that differ fundamentally from English and other European languages and therefore there is an urgent need to gain pedagogical awareness of CFL classrooms.
However, gaining a clearer picture of CFL does not mean pinning up the assumption that Chinese is so difficult that only ‘bright’ and talented students from advantaged backgrounds can learn it! The alienation remains, so does stereotype.
Kingsford Community School provides a good example for state schools of how the CFL class can be made compulsory, available, accessible and engaging to all students from diverse backgrounds.
Pedagogies for teaching Chinese are well-researched at Kingsford with a range of strategies developed which include bilingual approaches to aid the learning process and the maintenance of motivation and high performance.
There are many high achievers benefiting from bilingual learning experiences which means the challenge is less if learners are able and given opportunities to compare and discuss concepts in more than one language.
Chinese is negotiating its position as an equal with other MFLs to guarantee opportunity, equality and respect.
However, the current provision in terms of teaching hours and resources for gaining this equal position are far from adequate, and this pushes down demand and results in the loss of teachers and reduction of student numbers on courses.
Whether Chinese can be regarded as cultural capital that empowers students of all backgrounds depends on adequate provision, good pedagogies and a series of supportive policies in place. Schools and teachers cannot do it alone to ensure both equality of opportunities and achievement.

The above key findings have outlined a picture of both cautious optimism and rising concern, and suggested that without action from the government, changes in school policy and curriculum development, it will be hard for Chinese learning and teaching to meet these aspirations.

Part of the findings have fed into the PGCE Languages Programme and the GTP Mandarin course at Goldsmiths and served as reference for the training of Chinese language teachers and teacher education in the country and elsewhere.

Blog by Yangguang Chen

Vivencias and Lifeworlds in the Spanish classroom

On 12 April 2021, I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Princeton. This lecture-seminar was part of the training that Doctoral students in the department do as part of their postgraduate degree.

I presented a talk entitled ‘Vivencias and Lifeworlds in the Spanish classroom’ that talked about how language learning can be reconceptualised from being a way to acquire a body of knowledge and skills, or even a way of communicating, to be seen as a way of being and a way of living in the language.

I started the session by reading a poem in Catalan and asked students to suspend their rational minds while they turned their attention to how they perceived the language. I asked them to look out for the sounds and any other sensations that the poem evoked in them.

This kicked off our adventure to rethink the encounter with ‘another’ language in a different way: as the effort of being a person in the world or ‘languaging’ (Phipps 2007) from a multisensorial and performative way, or as ‘thought in the act’ (Manning and Massumi 2014).

I presented the concept of vivencias, an expansion of the concept of ‘Spracherleben’ by Busch (2017) to highlight the power of language to connect to our senses and our feelings, but also to our history and our relationships and entanglements with the world around us.

With a series of questions to the audience who were located in different parts of the world via Zoom, we explored the process of learning and speaking another language as a way of connecting with languages and cultures that draw on our past biographies as well as the ordinary and every day in our lives.

The discussion reflected on a way of reframing language as a process that mobilises one’s agency and affects in order to connect with our environment (social and material) to construct one’s own experience of the world.

Students took part in an exercise that has been very illuminating with students at Goldsmiths in the MA in Education, Culture, Language and Identity where they explored the role of objects and materiality in the construction of their subjectivities. They took it in turns to describe a ‘special’ meaningful object, which they brought to the seminar and showed to the camera, in terms of their cultural and linguistic identities.

The multiplicity of cultures and identities present in the seminar meant that this turned into a fascinating and stimulating session. Cloth bags, mate cups, musical instruments, paintings, and fluffy toys featured as cultural artifacts and everyday objects that are catalysts for a perceptive, reflective and imaginative exploration and the making sense of students’ vivencias (lived experience of life) in another language.

Blog by Cristina Ros i Solé