日本語: Japanese
All students at Ashburton Primary School attend a 50-minute Japanese session once a week. Learning Japanese broadens students’ horizons in relation to the personal, social, cultural and employment opportunities that an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world can offer. Japanese lessons take place in the Japanese room.
The 4 interrelated aims of the Japanese curriculum are to develop knowledge, understanding and skills to ensure students:
- communicate in Japanese
- understand the relationship between language and culture
- develop intercultural capabilities
- understand themselves as communicators.
Content in Japanese is organised under 3 interrelated strands with several sub-strands.
1. Engaging with Japanese Language and Culture (Foundation to Level 2 only)
- Engaging with Japanese language
- Engaging with Japanese culture
2. Communicating Meaning in Japanese
- Interacting in Japanese
- Mediating meaning in and between languages
- Creating text in Japanese
3. Understanding Language and Culture
- Understanding systems of language
- Understanding the interrelationship of language and culture
At Ashburton Primary School, the students mainly focus on five macro skills such as:
- listening
- speaking
- reading
- writing
- viewing
There are three types of characters in Japanese such as Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. The students learn all the types with various activities. As inter-cultural understanding, they develop ideas of cultural similarities and differences between Australia and Japan throughout the study.
The Japanese program is varied using songs, stories, games, arts and crafts. Multimedia tools are also used in the program to create a fun and interactive learning environment.
Learning Japanese develops learners’:
- communication skills
- literacy skills in their first and additional languages
- intercultural capabilities
- understanding of, and respect for, diversity and difference, and openness to different experiences and perspectives
- understanding and appreciation of how culture shapes worldviews, and extends their understanding of themselves, and their own heritage, values, culture and identity
- critical and creative thinking.
Hong Sensei