Q: developing a language policy for a school

[Harold Schiffman]

Forwarded from FL Teach

Language Policy for a school?

From: David Shelly
Reply-To: Foreign Language Teaching Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 07:01:04 -0500



Do any of you have experience in developing a "language policy" for
your school, or do you have one in place that you could share?
International Baccalaureate requires every IB school to establish a
language policy, and we will be working at it this year. Obviously
every school is different, and there is plenty of work we need to do
based on our unique situation, but there are also aspects of a
language policy - rationales, philosophies, goals - that could have a
lot in common, and it would be helpful to see what others have done.

To put it in simple terms,  a language policy is an overarching
document that discusses how a school deals with a multilingual
learning community to respect and enhance students' abilities in three
types of languages:  their mother tongue (when it is not a language of
the school - here there would be dozens of those), in English (the
language of the school, in the case here), and in other languages
taught as part of the curriculum (in our school that would be Spanish,
French and Mandarin). Federal and state laws and district policies are
a part of the equation, of course, but we are expected to go beyond
that to explain how we proactively address all of these language
needs.

Dave Shelly
IB Spanish
Wichita High School East

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-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to
its members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner
or sponsor of
the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a
message are encouraged to post a rebuttal. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)
*******************************************