Languages Article

While the Languages team are a relatively small domain of staff distributed evenly between French and Indonesian, we are also a bustling unit with classes in both languages being run right across all year levels. It has been amazing to be a part of the Languages team witnessing firsthand the awesome work of my colleagues, and it has been a privilege this year to be at its forefront as domain leader. 2023 has already been a hectic year for the Languages Learning Area here at Damascus.

All Year 7 classes have made an enthusiastic and positive start to their studies of French and Indonesian. These are new languages to the vast majority of students who start at Damascus, the majority of whom learnt Italian and Japanese in primary school. French and Indonesian might still seem quite strange, new and foreign at the moment especially for the Year 7 cohort. However, students are encouraged to retain their study of their language for as long as possible beyond their non-compulsory years, i.e. Year 9 and beyond. There are countless good reasons for learning a new language; just three of them are addressed towards the end of my piece.

Year 8 French classes have been running a hotly contested Culture Competition between the core groups, while their counterparts in Indonesian classes learnt lots about culture, music and arts in the ‘Bagus Kan’ Immersion Days on 17-18 May. As part of their respective assessments, the Year 9 French class showcased their fashion show while the Year 9 Indonesian class role-played bargaining scenes at a traditional market. Senior French students were exposed to discussions about the 2023 Alliance Françoise Film Festival, opening up opportunities to attend in Melbourne. Senior French and Indonesian groups continue to spend numerous lunch times at their respective Speaking clubs. 2023 has been a big year so far with more to come:

After an interlude of the past three years due to the Coronavirus pandemic impacting international travel, finally Damascus has a Study Tour! A group of senior Indonesian students are gearing up for their travel to Indonesia at the end of Semester One. Twenty-four current and former students from Years 9–12 will be spending their school holidays in Bali and Java learning about the local cultures and building up their proficiency at Bahasa Indonesia. The students will be accompanied by tour organiser Brendan Bawden, Steven Mifsud, Kirsten Phyland and Anna Rowland. While the thought of beautiful landscapes of beaches, volcanoes and terraced paddy fields, spending time with friendly locals and eating delicious exotic foods is both enticing and envy inducing to the onlookers, it is in reality a huge commitment from our Damascus contingent not least for the investment of their respective school holiday time for this tour. Brendan would know the amount of hard work that has been required to organise this tour. There is a possibility that the College will facilitate a French Study Tour in 2024, which make it if it goes ahead the first Damascus tour to France in six years.

As a conclusion, I wish to share with readers some commentary* about the benefits of learning languages that I sourced from Middlebury College in Vermont USA, which is widely regarded as the premier language learning school in that nation:

1. Learning a second language improves your memory
   The more you use your brain to learn new skills, the more your brain’s functions work. Learning a new language pushes your brain to get familiar with new grammar and vocabulary rules. It allows you to train your memory to remember new words, make connections between them, and use them in contextual situations.
   
2. It enhances your ability to multitask
   Time management and multitasking are two skills that will always help you. Multilingual people have the ability to switch between languages. Their ability to think in different languages and be able to communicate in more than one language helps with multitasking.
   
3. It improves your performance in other academic areas
   Fully immersing yourself in a language learning environment means not only learning the basics of that language. It means learning how to communicate in another language with your peers or participating in extracurricular activities in that specific language.
   
   *Sourcehttps://www.middlebury.edu/lan...