- 28 Jul 2015
Introducing the Language Learning Space
The Language Learning Space (LLS) is an Australian Government initiative providing free support and resources aligned with the Australian Curriculum: Languages for Indonesian, Chinese and Japanese. The website can be utilised to sequence and deliver digital activities to class sets of students. This includes high-quality “Challenges,” which are sets of resources sequenced in a narrative style that can be explored by students. The site also includes online professional learning, free Skype lessons with Indonesian language tutors in Bali and more. In a Term 1 workshop for INTAN members, Susan Marshall introduced us to the LLS with a live tutor demo and a walkthrough of the website, while Andrea Corston showed us one of the many valuable resources, Inanimate Alice, in depth…
As language teachers around the country are gearing up for the implementation of the Australian Curriculum: Languages, INTAN offered a workshop featuring Education Services Australia’s Susan Marshall to introduce an exciting and new set of ICT resources for use by Languages teachers around the country. Susan introduced a number of features of the Language Learning Space, which was developed with a funding from the Federal Government to support students and teachers in learning Asian languages.
The significance of the LLS is in its breadth and scope. It brings together tools and resources for teachers at all career stages by providing access to resources that would otherwise require a subscription fee, and by providing a variety of Professional Learning resources. These include tools for aligning teaching practice with the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) Professional Standards for Teachers.
Live Tutor Demo
One of the key features of the LLS is its partnership with the Indonesia Australia Language Foundation (IALF) in Bali. This means that all Australian teachers are able to book free sessions to practice their Bahasa Indonesia or to link up their classroom, via Skype, with an education-trained native speaker. In our workshop, Susan had organised for Andre, one of the four IALF tutors, to demonstrate how such a class could be run.
The tutor is contacted at least 24 hours before the lesson so that the lesson can be planned and prepared. During the class, the tutor will use Bahasa Indonesia for instructions, but will vary his or her language depending on the students’ understanding. In our demo, Andre utilised a virtual whiteboard to guide us “students” through some example content as an introduction to vocabulary. He then directed us to stand up and practice our language, and gathered volunteers to participate in some games directed with instructions in Indonesian.
The LLS Website – Challenges and Resource Bank
The LLS website provides thirty “Challenges,” for Years 5-10 students. These are resources curated into narrative sequences using interactive graphic novels in mixed English and Indonesian. As students read these stories and complete tasks, the teacher can monitor students’ progress using an inbuilt online learning platform. The cell-shaded photo-comic style and narrative focus of the sequences is very engaging. The stories are immersive and set in-country, linking Australia and Indonesia together with the rest of the world and developing students’ intercultural understanding.
Each activity is based around intercultural ideas, a central focus of the Australian Curriculum: Languages, and includes Australian Indigenous characters and perspectives. As a beginning teacher transitioning to language teaching, the Challenges create a rich backbone and point of departure for classroom teaching, with a broad range of resources to support learning. For an established teacher, the Challenges can be used as activities to add story-based learning and gamified elements to the classroom.
In addition to the Challenges, the LLS has a Resource Bank with over 300 items. The licensing fees are all pre-paid – for any teacher with access to Scootle, it is worth checking the LLS before paying for new subscription resources as they may already be available to you for free! These resources can be used as standalones, incorporated into the existing Challenges or sequenced as original Challenges to suit your cohort. Thus is the flexibility of the resource!
The LLS Website –Showcase
In addition to the resource bank, the LLS website provides a showcase of quality assured resources including the Bahasa Bites series, Rasa Bahasa, World Student Indonesia, Languages Online, West One, New Land New Language, The Language Market, and Inanimate Alice. During the workshop, Andrea Corston presented Inanimate Alice in-depth.
Produced by an international team including Educational Services Australia, Inanimate Alice takes a different approach to narrative language-learning. Described as “an interactive multimodal fiction, a born-digital novel,” the resource takes to form of an online graphic novel in the Indonesian language. Although it is presented at an advanced language level, Andrea showed us some practical ways in which even Year 4 or Year 5 students could benefit from the resource. The narrative can be shown in steps, and the students can be encouraged to think about what might be happening, and to discuss which words they recognise. The resource includes teacher tools, has an internationalist focus and teaches young people about empathy, citizenship and social responsibility.
The Teacher Side of LLS – Assessment, Reporting and Professional Learning
During the workshop, we ran out of time to explore the teacher side of the LLS. However, it is easy to manage for teachers who are already familiar with online learning platforms. The teacher can set up classrooms with which to track the progress of learners as they work through sequenced resources.
Although the pre-made Challenges incorporate assessments which the teacher can use, they can also add their own assessments and create their own Challenges. In doing the latter, the teacher can create their own incremental assessment in the form of multiple choice, matching pairs or true-or-false questions, or a holistic assessment at the conclusion of the Challenge which may also involve an in-depth assignment which can be uploaded to the teacher through the site.
The teacher can incorporate their own vocabulary list with the option of uploading audio. The curriculum links are incorporated in each Challenge, allowing the teacher to quickly and easily see what has been covered. As the students explore and complete the Challenge, the teacher can track their progress and print out reports.
Finally, the site hosts a large number of professional learning articles with practical, well-researched ideas for topics such as engagement, differentiation and promoting Indonesian language in schools.
Further Information
The ESA Languages team provides further training through workshops and webinars, and a large range of training videos and PDF documents can be found on the website.
The Language Learning Space can be accessed with your institutional log-in through the Scootle website or at www.lls.edu.au directly.
Did you attend the LLS workshop in Term 1? Do you use this resource in your classroom? We would love to hear about it! Please share your experience with the Indonesian teaching community by contacting the Suara Kita editor at bryce.allen.100@gmail.com, or the INTAN Committee via Brent Bloffwitch at bbloffwitch@gmail.com.