What is a Home Language Program?
Any HL Program is unique to its people, its context, its purpose. In essence it is dedicated time carved out to honour and ensure all home languages are valued and celebrated in your community. Designing a HL Program can have so many benefits for individuals and the community as a whole. On this page you can find resources to inspire, support and guide if you are collaborating to implement or develop an HL Program in your community!
Resources
Purpose & Vision
Defining the purpose of your Home Language Program and clearly communicating the shared vision sets everyone up for success! An example of goal sharing is below.
Learning Experiences
Designing and sharing learning experiences that are meaningful and engaging enables a bank of resources to be established for future use. Here are just. a few examples of activity resources.
People & Organisation
Gathering people, connecting people and creating a vision together can be a powerful thing. Making sure you involve as many voices as possible is powerful. Define the roles to honour the capacity of each individual.
Evaluation & Growth
Finding ways to collect input and feedback from participants, teachers, group leaders and families will help strengthen your HL Program and inform adaptations you make along the way. This may take the form of online surveys, regular meetings with group Language Ambassadors, anecdotal feedback from students and teachers.
HL Program Activity Examples
Storytelling
HL Groups had the opportunity to retell a story that reflected something important from their countries, culture or identity. This group chose the story of pizza and retold this in Italian.
Community Paperchain
Before the Winter holidays in December, we created a huge paper chain on which students wrote holiday greetings in their home language.
Creative Writing
Enabling students to write about a topic they are passionate about or share creative ideas in their home language is a wonderful opportunity to encourage curiosity about languages and enable free expression.
Language Mapping
Getting students to think about how they use language, when and with whom can be a powerful exercise. Lots of great discussion occurred about being multilingual when students did this together.
Honouring home language through community inquiries and events provides space for dialogue and reinforces the message that all languages are valued. Including these days to celebrate language diversity can be incorporated into other school events too – intentional planning with a multilingual lens!
Final Thoughts
As with any good program that is meant to fulfil the needs in a community, the program evolves, it changes, it often goes in directions not previously planned! The key is to keep asking questions, keep applying feedback, keep critically reflecting. The impacts of such a program are felt embedded in the daily practices of a community. They can be seen through the types of questions that are considered when planning curriculum and in the multilingual lens that is adopted by community members.
In my experience, we began to see subtle shifts in language use, beliefs and practices. For example:
- Celebrating home languages moved from isolated events to being part of daily interactions and learning.
- Home Language time moved from being ‘nice to have’ to being more widely understood to be essential to affirm identity, culture and impact learning potential.
- Home Language time moved from being thought to be only beneficial to speakers of other languages to being viewed as beneficial for the whole community
We observed:
Keep asking ‘what if…….’
If you are curious to discuss ideas further please do reach out to connect!
Jenny O'Fee 