1. The author: Chloe Briand, Teaching and Learning Languages Lead at Melbourne Archdiocese of Catholic Schools

The author of this post, Chloe Briand is a secondary French/Spanish teacher with over 20 years teaching experience. She is currently the Teaching and Learning Languages Lead at Melbourne Archdiocese of Catholic Schools, supporting over 300 primary and secondary schools’ language programs and their language teachers. Chloe was previously the Head of Languages at Methodist Ladies College (Melbourne), where she supported the implementation of EPI in all programs from Year 7 to Year 12 across four different languages with great success.

1.1. The journey

Four years after my first post on Dr Conti’s blog, I return to writing with great excitement, this time no longer as a language teacher and head of department, but as Lead for Teaching and Learning Languages at MACS (Melbourne Archdiocese of Catholic Schools) in Victoria, Australia. With just under two and half years in the role, the transition to no longer being in the classroom has been enormous, and I am truly grateful to have learnt so much about supporting many teachers and students with their language learning.

In this post, I would like to share with you the journey that has taken place in our primary sector, through the initiative called “Teachers as Co-Learners” (TCL). This program was born in 2017, with 2 schools participating in the launch of this exciting venture. The starting point was the idea that a once-a-week lesson for primary students was not the most effective way for them to learn a language efficiently. To move past this realisation, it became clear that short daily language lessons would be far more beneficial, as they would counteract Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve and provide students with the chance to truly retain language over time. Another key idea was that this program would be delivered by the classroom teacher, who would not be a trained language specialist, and who be supported by a language teacher/expert who spoke the language fluently during the week. Students and classroom teachers would share the journey and learn together. Add to the mix a focus on communicative language for use throughout the day, and this was how TCL was born.

Fast forward a few more years, COVID added to severe language teacher shortages. When I started the role, we saw more and more primary schools dealing with major issues with staffing their language programs (note for non-Victorian schools, languages are one of the key learning areas mandated by the Victorian Curriculum, and they form part of the compliance requirements from the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA), our statutory authority). Therefore, the need for systemic support in the shape of fully built programs and resources was significant. Writing full scopes and sequences for Foundation to Year 6 students of Italian, French, and Indonesian, including all teaching material, weekly planners, daily lessons, resources and materials, assessments and marking rubrics was the key to many schools adopting this program and delivering language through this model. The other key component was that it had to be accessible to teachers who did not speak the language and engage all participants alike.

This is where E.P.I. came into play. When we first started to write the program, we imagined that MARS’ EARS would be our guide to planning sequences of activities which would be easily understandable by teachers and enjoyable by students. It was, but also so much more.

Coming from the secondary sector and transitioning into curriculum design for the primary setting was an incredible challenge. As we wrote and re-wrote our curriculum, teachers and students continued to give us feedback every term, and it became pretty clear pretty quickly that Dr Conti’s language approach is the only one I have come across which is sustainable from the very first year of language learning in Foundation all the way to Senior secondary. Of course, activities are much more scaffolded to match the cognitive developmental stages of students in this context, but the same principles apply all the way.

What we have also embedded in our programs are explicit links to literacy, and types of literacy activities which classroom teachers are familiar with (what is called pop-up grammar/phonics in EPI), so that they can start to connect the dots between all languages. I can happily report that our TCL teachers are frequently commenting to us now that “all language is Literacy”. Students are highly engaged, and their language skills are absolutely staggering (we are now starting to hear rumblings from secondary schools in TCL catchment areas about needing to create entry pathways into Year 7 for those students, as they are far too advanced to start at Year 7 beginner level). The most unexpected part in this is the realisation from classroom teachers, almost in disbelief, that not only can they ‘do this’, but also, that they are ‘good at languages’. Coming from adults who consider themselves to be monolinguists, this truly is the icing on the cake.

Conclusions and way forward

We are now in a huge growth phase of the TCL network, with 50 schools currently in Melbourne, and we anticipate more in the years to come. This model is proving to be the most effective way to teach languages in primary schools, because of the high frequency of lessons and the delivery by the classroom teacher with whom students have an established rapport. However, this all hinges on the success of language acquisition due to a robust pedagogical approach, EPI, which actively promotes all students experiencing success. Of course, we are also working on getting our trained language teachers involved in the program, as this success is also reliant on language experts who support classroom teachers’ and students’ learning. This will be the next piece of the puzzle to fall into place, and I can anticipate that TCL clusters sharing a language teacher to deliver the program will bring schools and communities even closer together as they all partake in common success.