Northgate High School and 6th form college in Dereham is hosting Maria, a Spanish language assistant from Spain. We spoke to Dave Brook, Assistant Head Teacher and Vince Everitt, Head of Languages to hear how a language assistant opens horizons for the pupils.
Dave Brook, Assistant Head Teacher: Northgate High School in Dereham is based in the centre of Norfolk. We’re a semi-rural school with students coming from the town and the villages around, as well as students that live out further afield.
We see that all of these students have a lovely place to grow up in Norfolk. It's a really beautiful place to live, but it also hides some issues for students in terms of being able to feel part of the wider country and global community. And we see that languages is a really important part of helping students to feel part of that bigger community.
Sometimes students can feel that they have less engagement with the wider world than they might have if they were growing up in larger cities such as Birmingham and Manchester. This means that languages is a really important part of education here because it gives students the opportunity to learn about the wider world.
And it's not just about learning the actual language, although we feel that's really important that they have those skills to be able to communicate with other people. But it's also giving them the cultural awareness so that they can respect and value people that have different backgrounds, particularly thinking about employability skills when they are older and the fact that as we move to a much more globalised economy in the future, they will be able to work with people from different countries and appreciate the backgrounds that those colleagues come from.
So we feel that having a language assistant is a really valuable part of the provision we have for our students here. If you were teaching music, dance or drama, you regularly take students to go and see performances showing them experts at work in the skill that they're trying to learn. For us, it's harder to take students abroad to go and visit other countries. So for regular practice, having an assistant here is a really important part of students being able to practice and develop the habits of being able to talk fluently in whichever language they are learning.
We have a learning cycle that is at the heart of everything that we do in the classroom. Two of the areas we have on our learning cycle are modelling and practice. For modelling, it's about being able to see and hear from an expert in a different language, how you would explain things, how you teach the rhythm of the language. And then the practice is actually being able to work with the students and then to be able to develop their own confidence. We know that the students who spend their time with our current assistant get a lot of value out of the time they spend with her. Students are often able to say the words, but now they are actually doing it with confidence and they feel communication is at the heart of what they are doing.
The ability to embrace other people's cultures and to show an interest and an understanding of what they're doing, it's not only important about making human beings feel valued, but it's important for our own economic performance as well as a country and feeling we are actually making a positive contribution to the world with sympathy and with care.
The benefits of having a language assistant go beyond the actual linguistic practice. For our students it's an opportunity to talk to someone from a different country about their culture, about their experiences growing up and start to understand about the different viewpoints of the world that are out there. For students it also gives them an opportunity to work with someone who's actually living in a different community themselves and to see that it is possible to live in another country and in another language and do that with confidence and with enjoyment.
