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JSV Strategies to Help Students Learn and Love Dutch
Developing a shared vision for our Dutch teaching team at JSV has been an important step in enhancing our students’ Dutch language learning. Living in the Netherlands, we want our students to learn and love Dutch!
“In our team of five experienced Dutch teachers, there is a lot of expertise. Since we all teach students with different levels of exposure to Dutch, we weren’t always aware of what was happening in each other’s classes. We felt it was important to familiarise ourselves with the progression of skills throughout the different groups. We wanted to explore what teaching practices we had in common, learn from each other and ask ourselves critically: does our classroom practice reflect the latest research?
Our discussions focused on:
ensuring students effectively acquire language in the time we have with them;
making the process of learning Dutch fun; research like Self-Determination Theory and Brain-Friendly Learning has shown that this approach keeps students engaged and motivated;
observing each other’s classes to see best practice linked to the research that is already being used in our classes.
We all feel empowered and reassured after coming out of this process. We have identified so much good practice already happening, and now we know WHY it works and how we can make small adjustments to make our teaching even more effective. Learning from each other’s expertise, we’ve grown into a stronger team and are motivated to continue to build on this work. In the coming academic year, we will finalise our vision document and use it to revise our curriculum.”
Based on the latest research on language acquisition and how it influences pedagogy, the team devised a mission statement, and identified five key principles at the heart of their lessons.
Mission
To create a safe learning environment in to support and motivate and motivate all students to learn Dutch in a fun and dynamic way, enabling each student to embrace and enjoy both the language and cultural aspects of the Netherlands.
Key Principles
Relationships: build strong, positive relationships with and among students; create a safe and collaborative environment.
Fostering intrinsic motivation: centre the students’ interests and provide opportunities for them to practise autonomy, feel competent and feel they belong.
Comprehensible input: communicate authentically and meaningfully to facilitate implicit language acquisition.
Interactive learning: make the content live using tools such as games, activities and visual elements that require participation.
Dynamic and brain-friendly learning.
Here is an example of putting the theory into practice, combining elements that the Dutch team have all used in their lessons:
The teacher dresses up and acts out being fed up with their par rot because it keeps copying them. Can the children help the pirate find a new pet? After singing a song with some vocabulary to describe pets, the children draw the pets they have at home (autonomy). Childr en who have the proficiency level to describe their pet write about it, while others use sentence starters to provide more information (competence).
In the next lesson, these descriptions are shared with the class, and the children match pets to the owners in class (relationships). The pirate comes in again and chooses one of the pets; it’s one of the student’s puppy! It turns out the dog is very cheeky, and the children laugh very hard as the dog tries to eat the pirate’s hat. The pirate chooses another pet, and the scenario repeats itself, using the same language structures to allow for many repetitions so that children can acquire the language naturally.
