L.O.T.E.

L.O.T.E.

Italian Language Learning at Holy Trinity

Holy Trinity’s Language Vision Statement:

“At Holy Trinity Primary School we enable and empower students to appreciate the importance of Language Learning and an appreciation for cultural diversity. We aim for the Italian language to be visible in all aspects of school life, therefore the language will be used often within the school community and over time embedded in the home environment. Our school vision is for the Italian language to become more alive within the Holy Trinity community, introducing and reinforcing the gesture-based learning methodology as an approach for improving the Italian language education at our school.”

Holy Trinity offers the Italian language from Foundation through to Year Six.

Our Italian language is taught through a gesture methodology approach to language learning. This new and exciting gesture approach focuses on introducing new and revised Italian vocabulary, a selection of phrases or words through the use of gestures and actions. This language learning approach has been successfully developed and implemented to support students with expanding their Italian vocabulary and further developing a deeper understanding of how the language is used and works in different conversational contexts.

This comprehensive language program focuses on developing skills in all four learning dimensions of Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening. The program’s main objective is to introduce and teach the students 100 Italian functional words each year so students can expand their Italian vocabulary and actively use the language to engage in conversations with teachers, peers and parents.

The program highly promotes and encourages students to use the Italian language actively in different real-life situations- making the Italian language authentic and purposeful. The language program aims to enhance communication in the target language throughout the whole school, making the language more visible within the school community. This unique language learning initiative has been purposefully designed and implemented to highly encourage all students to use the Italian vocabulary learned to speak in Italian within their language sessions, classroom and home contexts. Each Italian word or phrase is introduced with a gesture. The aim of the gestures is to support students with learning, understanding and retaining the Italian vocabulary. A range of oral language and hands-on activities have been especially designed to support students with learning how to use the Italian functional language in different everyday situations.

During Italian language sessions which run for an hour duration, five phrases or words are introduced to the students and gestures are also introduced to support the word’s meaning .The phrases and words are introduced and taught throughout a range of literacy based activities. The Italian functional language and gestures are introduced in class and are then filtered into the classrooms where teachers actively engage in using the Italian language with their students. Students use the familiar Italian functional language to support them with sentence building tasks, creating simple and complex sentences, composing written texts and engaging in conversational dialogue.

Each year, Holy Trinity promotes ‘Cultural Diversity’ by celebrating and participating in Harmony, Multicultural and Italian days. On these special days, students and teachers become immersed in a range of fun and engaging cultural activities which focuses on developing a deeper awareness of other cultures in our growing society.

To further promote the Italian language at our school, Italian club operates once a week during lunchtime which is successfully run by our language teacher and  current Year 6 Italian leaders. A range of cultural activities are carefully planned so that students can enjoy the many interactive cultural learning experiences.

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