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Every teacher is a language teacher

Language-learning reaches beyond the use of words to impact on culture, identity and international-mindedness. Laura Bridgestock discovers how the global IB community is responding to the challenges of a changing linguistic landscape

As the school day bursts into life at the American-British Academy (ABA) in Muscat, Oman, students file into classes and the corridors are filled with boisterous chatter and enthusiastic greetings. The scene is identical to those played out daily in every corner of the globe, with one crucial difference: the sheer number of languages being spoken would leave almost any visitor, a little ironically, lost for words.

From English and French to Arabic and Chinese, plans are made and schoolwork is dissected in almost every recognizable language on the face of the planet. It resembles a United Nations conference where the delegates all wear school uniform.

Languages have always been at the heart of the IB. You can’t build an international organization without embracing them, and you can’t nurture international-mindedness without enabling students to do the same. Beyond that, language is an issue no educator can afford to ignore: studies show that a firm grounding in a first language is essential for academic development, and learning additional languages enhances the learning of the ‘mother tongue’ as well as broadening a student’s worldview.

Much of this is second nature to teachers. After all, as the IB continues to grow and extend access to its programmes to students from an ever more diverse range of backgrounds, languages will naturally have a vital part to play. But their impact is further-reaching than many realize. For areas ravaged by war, genocide or natural disaster, indigenous languages can be one of the few links left to a dying culture. If systems of education fail to encourage the learning of native languages, they can fall out of use and ultimately exist only as relics.

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson use the emotive term ‘linguistic genocide’ to describe the effect of ignoring such needs, and believe the right to a native language and culture should be enshrined as an inviolable human right. The IB’s special request languages scheme, and its emphasis on mother tongue entitlement, attempts to make progress in this direction, but the problem, as any linguist will tell you, is as complex as the myriad languages themselves.

Home from home

At ABA in Oman, the school’s 940 students represent more than 60 nationalities and speak more than 50 languages. Once, this made ABA “a place where everyone comes from somewhere else,” but now, says Primary Years Programme (PYP) English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher Nancy Stauft, it’s become a true international community.

The transformation dates to 21 February 2004, when the school decided to celebrate International Mother Language Day. Since then, it has become an annual week-long event, including film screenings in a variety of languages, daily multilingual news broadcasts from the school’s radio studio, lessons given by teachers in their own native languages and even some where English is banned, forcing students to pool together their collective language skills to act as translators for each other.

Banning English may seem like a step backwards. But Nancy believes encouraging students to use their mother tongue gets them interested in their native language and heritage:

“As teachers we’re generally excited by all the different languages our students speak. It’s always a surprise to find they’re often shy to use their language. They lack pride in their own culture.”

Mother Language Week has changed that – and not just for the week. Placing language centre stage has made teachers aware of different learning styles and backgrounds, and encouraging students to use their mother tongue alongside English has become second nature. In a PYP class creating story books, every second page will be left blank so students can translate the English, with the help of families. In chemistry, Middle Years Programme (MYP) and Diploma Programme students create multilingual periodic tables, and in maths translate functions.

There are posters on the walls in every language, with tongue-twisters, proverbs, greetings, even animal sounds – as Nancy points out, a cow doesn’t say ‘moo’ in every language.

“It’s completely transformed the way we approach students, and the way students and their families approach the school,” she says. “We have students and parents who are proud to be from Nigeria, for instance, and to speak a special dialect. They feel valued – part of a community.”

The power of words  

Around half the students at United World College-USA (UWC-USA) in Montezuma, New Mexico are not native speakers of English, the school’s teaching language. Until recently, the task of improving these students’ language skills was left to ESL teachers. Many students felt cut off from a system that seemed to favour native English speakers. “It’s a strong political issue,” says English A1 teacher Hannah Tyson. “Language is power, and the second-language students have always felt the first-language students had more
power.” Teachers are now running a series of seminars looking at ways of integrating language development into all lessons.

UWC-USA is just one step ahead of an initiative that could soon be IB-wide. Language and learning manager Carol Inugai-Dixon is heading the development of a course that will be open to all IB teachers and will provide guidance for schools coordinating language teaching across the curriculum, with a particular focus on improving support for students learning in a language other than their mother tongue. The initiative reflects the IB’s aim of increasing access, to “enable more students to experience and benefit from an IB education regardless of personal circumstances.” This means viewing growth not just in terms of numbers of schools and students, but social and geographical diversity too.

The IB is also extending the support it provides for students and teachers in languages other than English, French and Spanish. In 2007, the IB Board of Governors increased the number of languages in which resources and services are available to schools, and IB students can take the Language A1 examination in more than 80 different languages, many of which are not available in any other examination system.

English isn’t enough

Despite the experience of the IB in Ecuador (see box above), English is more widely studied as a second language than any other, and demand is still growing. But as UK-based linguist David Graddol argues, the growth of English as a “near-universal skill” has, in fact, increased the importance of speaking other languages. Where once English gave students a competitive edge in the employment market, it’s now become a new “baseline”, and it’s the extra languages you speak that make you stand out.

There are other reasons for supporting both mother tongue and second languages. Tell a child to leave their native language at the door, says Mike Bostwick of Katoh Gakuen Gyoshu High School in Numazu, Japan, and you send a clear message: an important part of me is not valued.

Students who are cut off from their mother tongue are also alienated from a culture, heritage, and sometimes even a family. But equally, students who are shut out from other languages are denied a valuable point of access to other cultures and ways of thinking. And as Katoh Gakuen Gyoshu shows, gaining a second language and culture doesn’t have to mean losing another; the two can strengthen each other.

Mike is head of the school’s bilingual programme, in which students – who are almost all Japanese – are taught in English most of the time, and the majority gain the bilingual IB diploma. When the programme was launched in 2001, parents expressed concerns that immersion would alienate students from their own language and culture, but a study carried out in the same year showed the reverse to be true. Compared to students at three non-bilingual Japanese schools, the bilingual students had a more positive attitude towards the English language and English-speaking cultures, but also a greater awareness of and identity with Japan and its culture.

It doesn’t surprise Mike. The school teaches the full national Japanese language syllabus and also runs an additional course in Japanese culture. This gives students a vital route to understand and appreciate a second language and culture, he believes:

“If you don’t see or experience a culture other than your own, you can’t compare it to anything. Encountering another culture doesn’t just broaden perspectives, it sharpens distinctions – even the ones we didn’t know were there.”

Reviving culture

This philosophy has proved even more revolutionary for Murray Bridge High School in Murray Bridge, Australia. The school works closely with the local Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal community to teach its language and culture in MYP classes, from specific classes in grammar, vocabulary and sentence construction to Ngarrindjeri units in art, science and English. Local primary schools are running similar initiatives, with the aim of reviving a language falling out of use as English became increasingly prevalent among Ngarrindjeri students in Australian schools.

Not all schools run bilingual programmes, but the concept of language as a tool for inquiry, rather than an end in itself, is at the very heart of the IB approach. The new PYP language scope and sequence document, due in February 2009, is aimed at all PYP teachers. “Language underlies all learning,” says Sandy Paton, PYP curriculum manager. “It provides a vehicle for inquiry and, in turn, language skills are best developed in the both structured and informal inquiries.”

When the University Laboratory School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA introduced the PYP in 2005, PYP coordinator Christelle Thompson rethought the way she approached languages. “I went from teaching my French curriculum in isolation, to an approach that takes into account all the different units of inquiry,” she says.

When her second-grade class study animals, they learn how to describe and talk about them in French. When the fourth grade start a unit on measuring and analyzing change, French lessons may focus on weather variation. Interaction is essential, she says, as is making issues significant to students and relating them to a global perspective. The final criteria? Languages should be fun – something every teacher and student can certainly relate to.

Increasing access

Extending access to IB programmes to the greatest possible number of students isn’t always simply a case of nurturing minority languages. In Ecuador, a government-led initiative to gain IB authorization for a state school in each of the country’s 22 provinces has led to the development of a beginner-level English course.

IB language courses were already offered in 11 other languages, but no demand for English at this level had existed. The scarcity of second-language teaching in Ecuador’s state sector meant schools lacked teachers of the required level to offer the English B course.

To meet the language Group 2 requirement, Simon Roberts, subject area manager for languages Groups 1 and 2, travelled to Quito to run workshops training teachers for the
new beginner-level course.

“There’s a perception that English is taught everywhere in the world and it’s just not needed at this level,” he says. “But as we’ve found, that’s not true.”