This year at MIC, we've embarked on a new initiative which is our language instruction. When we first started two years ago, we were unsure about what language instruction we should follow. We knew that learning a second language was important but to be honest we didn't know exactly why. That raises all sorts of dilemmas, principally:
- What language should we teach?
- How sophisticated should the instruction be?
- What support or resource material do we need to acquire?
These seemed to us at the time to be relatively easy questions to answer, but when we tried we were thrown off course straight away. Take for instance what language we should teach as a second language? Should it be French (the traditional diplomatic language and with a large segment of the Pacific speaking French - not irrelevant)? What about Hindi? However, the Hindi spoken in Fiji is noticeably different to that spoken in India. If we teach Hindi spoken in Fiji, it might not be considered as relevant as Hindi for most of the Indian sub-continent. What about how sophisticated it should be - do we include writing, grammar, literature? Do we buy text books, hire a specialised teacher, purchase a language lab?
This may explain some of our procrastination. Now however, we're clear on what we want to do, why we want to do it and how we want to do it. It's in no small part due to the help that we've received from a distinguished linguist who used to work at USP and whose expertise is in different Indian languages spoken both in India and around the world.
Why Teach a Second Language?
Let's start with the why of teaching a second language. The answer we like is because we know that our children are going to be encountering many different people from different parts of the globe in their adult and working life. With transportation being relatively cheap and migration being the norm, not the exception, our children will encounter people's whose first language is not necessarily from those places geographically closest to us. In our effort to learn how to communicate with these people as effectively as possible, we have to understand that a literal word-by-word translation may often miss the whole point that a person is trying to make. Increasingly (which of course means our children) need to understand that the person trying to speak to us in our language, may stumble because they do not understand the context that they say a word; or they may think they are being witty when it sounds to us like an insult; or they may sound calm when in fact they are hopping mad but express it differently.
Any we learn these aspects of communication by putting ourselves in the same situation. In other words we learn ourselves how to communicate in a foreign language that we do not know.
That makes the choice of which language we should choose, not so hard. It doesn't really matter which language it is, as long as we are struggling to make our meaning clear. Swahili? - sure. Inuit? - no problem.
So to sum up, we teach a second language in order to understand the difficulties that someone who is speaking to us in our language, but them, it is their second language.
What we Want to Teach?
So children at MIC will be learning a second language with which they are not familiar. For primary and early secondary, we are teaching Fijian and Rotuman. We teach Fijian to all those children who cannot speak or understand Fijian (simple enough) and for those children that can do this, we teach them Rotuman. This means that all our children are encountering a new language. We'll have to put our thinking caps on if we have a pupil who is fluent in Fijian and Rotuman!
How we Want to Teach?
Since our focus is primarily on the ability to open minded about people speaking to us in a second language, we are focussing primarily on the 'spoken' language instruction. The best way to teach spoken language is of course to speak it! However, we are also keen to make the spoken language relevant and inherently interesting. Every been to a language class in which you were taught 'Excuse me but could you show me the way to the natural history museum/metro/nearest podiatrist? We don't have any of those things in small Pacific Island nations. What we are all inherently interested in, is food. Of course we also have a home economics part of our curriculum. So we are going to do our language learning through food preparation, food production, cooking food and of course everybody's favourite - consuming it - yum!