Languages

Throughout primary and secondary school, my experience with language was limited to French. I remember enjoying French lessons at school as they were an opportunity to learn with a specialist teacher and mainly involved games, singing activities as well as learning about a new culture. Whilst I enjoyed studying French, my interest lies predominantly within East Asian culture, which is rarely explored in schools. Because of this, I began learning Chinese Mandarin at university in my spare time. I also attended some culture-focused classes where I learnt about the differences between British and Chinese culture. Ultimately, I chose to write about Languages for my PED2016 assignment where we were asked to consider how two of the foundation subjects enable both creative and cross-curricular learning experiences to occur. I found writing the assignment to be an enjoyable experience as it relates so heavily to my continued study of Mandarin, as well as my part-time job as an online EFL teacher. I observed the teaching of Languages during my developmental placement which saw the children using 'Minimus' to study Latin. I found it interesting that the school had decided to teach an ancient language as opposed to a modern one, as this seems to be the current trend amongst schools. There was a lack of language teaching during my consolidation placement as I was based in EYFS/KS1 where the teaching of Languages is not compulsory.