Students at Nundah State School are taught Japanese language from Prep through to Year 6. Japanese remains one of the most widely studied languages in Australia. The culture of Japan, both traditional and modern, continues to fascinate students of all ages and at Nundah we capitalise on this curiosity as we learn language together.
Both the Department of Education and the National Curriculum for Languages recognise the importance of providing opportunities for Australian children to learn Asian languages and take advantage of the exciting possibilities of an increasingly globalised world. At Nundah State School Japanese is introduced in Prep and taught by Specialist teachers until the end of upper primary with the allocated time increasing as the students move into Year 6.
In Prep to Year 2 the focus is on basic vocabulary, greetings, self-introduction, and sentence patterns describing the immediate world of the students such as family and school. Students learn Japanese primarily through speaking and listening during these grades. Songs, rhymes and stories are used to introduce language elements and assist with pronunciation. Students also begin to recognise the difference between the three scripts: hiragana, katakana and kanji and the role each script plays in Japanese language.
In Years 3 to 6 the students learn more specialised vocabulary such as adjectives and verbs pertaining to the unit of study. They also reflect on their own cultural knowledge and compare the different ways we show politeness, consideration and respect. Awareness and knowledge of Japanese culture, both traditional and modern, are introduced as appropriate to each year level. As well as speaking and listening comprehension, students learn to recognise and then write Japanese script in upper year levels. In Year 6, students are given the opportunity to show their understanding of hiragana through levelled quizzes to obtain proficiency in both reading and writing symbols. Units of work are often complemented with relevant incursions to give students an opportunity to broaden their understanding of Japanese culture or to give opportunities for authentic language use.
Learning a language builds a number of transferrable skills such as intercultural understanding, critical and creative thinking, ICT capability through use of multimodal resources as well adding to overall literacy and numeracy skills. As students learn an additional language, they develop the ability to decode, notice patterns, order and relationships and come to a greater understanding of their own language through the study of grammatical and textual conventions.
For further information about additional language acquisition from the Department of Education in Queensland State Schools click on the link below.
https://learningplace.eq.edu.au/cx/resources/file/79f8c8db-1f9c-46d1-b2b6-58233ee0810e/1/index.html