Raising Achievement and Social Integration of Multi-lingual Learners

This term at Hagley, our focus has been on developing a workshop to share teaching strategies that are helpful for multi-lingual learners. It has become increasingly evident that literacy strategies that are essential for multi-lingual learners are of benefit to all students. We are hoping that the work we have done will help teachers to develop literacy strategies to address subject specific academic literacy skills for all students.

We have enjoyed working with several groups of teachers across all departments through a series of opt-in workshops. Participants were given the opportunity to try out different ways of supporting students with the literacy demands of their subjects. This included getting to know students, encouraging social cohesion, using digital tools like immersive reader and recycling language activities to help students understand subject specific language. We will offer further workshop opportunities for teachers to access in term three. We will continue to vary the activities, times and dates so that we can reach as many teachers as possible.

In class, students have been working on the information literacy achievement standard. During this unit, we continued to support students with the literacy demands required. We introduced them to features on Microsoft TEAMS and the Edge browser including immersive reader, translation/picture dictionary tool and reader view. We continue to encourage collaboration between students through activities like whole class debates and sharing of ideas in small groups and pairs. We are looking forward to term 3 when we move into two more achievement standards and new opportunities for students to engage with each other and achieve together.