Supporting Japanese language learners
Watch a teacher outline approaches used to support a student who has entered her class without prior knowledge or learning in a language.
Resource information
Here the teacher offers positive feedback to a colleague, who has delivered a presentation to the leadership team. She praises the teacher’s approach to student ownership of their learning. She highlights aspects of the presentation that she feels strongly appealed to the leadership team, particularly those aspects that focus on student independence.
Teaching Italian and Japanese part time at Davidson High School, the teacher also works as a consultant in surrounding schools delivering professional learning. In her class she addresses an issue frequently faced by teachers of languages other than English: student mobility. Most of her students have been learning Japanese for three years, but at the beginning of Year 10, a new student who has not learned Japanese before enters her class. She needs to work out differentiated strategies to meet a new set of specific learning needs, as well as those already existing in her class.
Discussion questions:
- What range of specific learning needs have you identified in one of your classes this year?
- How do you use differentiated strategies in your teaching to meet specific learning needs?
- How can teachers and schools ensure that students who move between schools are not educationally disadvantaged?
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