Celebrating international literacy day
It’s “International Literacy Day” on Monday 8 September- sowhat better way to put a marker in the sand and make those cross curricular firststeps between target language learning and literacy."Literacy and sustainable development" is the strap line and when you reflect on what we hope to achieve for our young learners it's that they will become competent young linguists who can communicate for work and business in another language sometime in their futures. who knows what communication and language challenges in their work and personal lives they may have to face.
Languages and Literacy belong together sothis is an ideal opportunity to investigate and celebrate links between languages and the structure of languages. Here area few ideas we can easily incorporate in to our language teaching and learningnext week – even if it’s a day or two after the official international literacy day!!
Possibility One :Exploring the World family of languages
Whohas the book below on their shelves.....somewhere?
Take the children on anexploration of another language - maybeone that is spoken by children in school or maybe one that is unfamiliar to allyour learners.
I love the fact that the subtitle says "talk your way around the world"!
The book has short histories of each language , simple anduseful phrases, pronunciation guides and a structure focus e.g in Turkish it’sexplained that there are two words for “you” …..now how easy is that to link toFrench , German…..??
Possibility Two: a international story read by the author is his/her originallanguage
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BfGONXVToA]
Does it matter is the children don’t understand each word?In this instance it’s about the children seeing that stories exist in otherlanguages. We love using this Eric Carle clip of the Hungry Caterpillar read inGerman by the author himself.
Possibility Three: Taking a thought for a walk in two languages!
Why not explore some simple writing in the target languageyou teach in school. I love this cartoon and the blog I wrote last academicyear is all about how we can encourage young language learners to take athought for a walk in any language!
Possibility four :Links between Literacy,target language grammar anddrama