An exploration with three bilingual children’s engagement with learning Spanish as an after-school club

This project reflects my interest in the subject of bilingualism based on both personal and professional experience. I was born and grew up in a little town in Italy. For many years I both thought of myself and felt different from my peers because my mother is Hungarian. While her spoken Italian was understandable her written skills were insufficient to help me during my initial study. After thirty years I still have to write and translate letters for my mother. Her brothers and sisters live in different parts of Europe. Although for many years the only way to communicate with them was through body language, I always enjoyed being in contact with them and travelling. However, I have found it very frustrating sometimes not being able to express myself to them, especially my grandmother because I believe the passage of knowledge and experience between generations is important. Later in life I found myself living in a foreign country and being multilingual and multicultural. In addition, I found my language knowledge to be an important part of my job: sometimes I translate and create links between the school I am working in and pupils’ families and I am a language teacher for students aged five to nine once a week in an after-school club.

I have always enjoyed learning languages and discovering new cultures because culture is also expressed through language. The association with culture is through the production and exchange of meanings and how we make sense of the world around us. We produce ideas in our heads that are organized and regulated by the social and the institutional worlds. Languages help us to construct meaning, as they work through constructed representations. Languages use signs and symbols to express and represent ideas and feelings, and it is, only through the process of decoding and interpreting that we can access them. Meaning is constructed through language, and language is therefore crucial to culture. As Hall (2000) stated, the production and circulation of meaning take place through culture and language.

This project also reflects my study career. I began studying Education Science in Italy many years ago and enjoyed modules like cultural anthropology, epistemology, philosophy, psychology, intercultural pedagogy, sociology, methodology and technique of play and animation, social pedagogy, psychopedagogy of language and communication, disabilities pedagogy and didactics. Continuing to study here in England gave me the chance to extend my previous knowledge and combine it with my work experience. This has enabled me to gain an understanding of the theory of education through education practice.

I am aware of the decision by the Department for Children, School and Families (DCSF) to introduce foreign languages into the Primary School Curriculum, and from January 2010 its will be statutory for every primary school. However, a new National Curriculum, including languages as a fully compulsory subject, will be introduced in September 2011. I therefore decided to investigate children’s engagement in learning a modern foreign language. I believe that learning another language will help communities to become closer and achieve a better understanding. It will broaden knowledge of different cultures, help communication between people and give students the opportunity to be part of a new era of global opportunities.
This is a significant subject to investigate considering that a lack of methodology or understanding may result in a funding that the DCSF’s document and its purpose are a failure, indeed, it may have a big impact on pupils’ lives and future.

The DCSF does not impose a specific methodology for teaching languages in primary schools. Instead it stresses the importance of understanding children’s engagement and motivation to learn and to maximize the benefit that learning a new language can bring. This research project will investigate engagement with learning the Spanish language as an after-school club activity. In order to do so I will observe and interview three students at Lower Key Stage 2 and relate my research to previous researches on bilingualism and policy in this area.