Even if you are in a state that does not use the Australian Curriculum, each state still takes notice of and inspiration from our (supposedly) national curriculum.
You are probably aware that Version 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum has been released for a range of Languages, including Italian and Japanese.
Overview of Version 9.0
So just how different is Version 9.0? Is there anything major you are going to need to change in your programming?
Yes and no. In terms of the end product that your students experience in the classroom, the changes are not drastic. In terms of your ‘back end’ teacher documentation with assessing and reporting, things will look a bit different, so it’s important to understand those changes.
Key Simplifications and Streamlining
There are two major streamlining and simplifications that have occurred.
Firstly, the curriculum has been amended to ensure there is more commonality across the languages. The European language documents are similar to one another and the scripted Asian documents are too. If you opened the French curriculum, you’d find it very similar to Italian. And if you were to open the Japanese curriculum, you’d find it similar to Mandarin. Whether or not you think this is a good thing is open to interpretation.
Another major shift is that the achievement standards have been drastically shortened. A lot of the specific language examples that were in the achievement standard have been moved into the content descriptions instead.
For the primary teachers, it’s important to note that the Foundation level now has been separated out to be on its own.
Opportunities and Resources
Where does this leave us? Well, the positive side of not having to make drastic changes is that you can still try and leverage this change to try and get some planning time or new resources for your course.
All of our Avanti Tutta! and Peko Peko resources are Australian Curriculum aligned. If you are looking for a fresh new resource to suit the new curriculum, we’d love to hear from you! You can check out our language resources here. If you’d like to find out more, simply reply to this email and one of our Lingopont Italian or Japanese expert will get back to you.
P.S. We haven’t forgotten about states that do not use the Australian Curriculum – we are writing our resources to ensure they cover the needs of all teachers and students. If you’d like more info about how our resources align to the curriculum in your state, reply this email with any questions
