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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