Tweetalig Onderwijs

Keith Kelly

A crowd of 600 tto-teachers bustled at “De Reehorst”, 1 November.  As always the Dutch annual meeting, organised by the European Platform, was an inspiring event. I was most impressed by a key note speaker, Keith Kelly. Lees door »

This year I am not going to show any mercy. I slammed it into them straight away.
The art lesson in my first form group consists of two hours, with a break in between. In the the first hour I managed to instruct them for their first task. Apparently they understood my English well enough to start working on a self portrait while “paying attention to proportions”, which is a difficult concept for spunky young artists. No Dutch was needed. And I listened to them. Once in a while I feigned being baffled when someone asked something in Dutch. I guess they felt ill at ease. I didn’t console them. Lees door »

Just before the last school week I found a mail in my inbox from some colleague, Peter, who works at a school that will start with a tto-programme as of August. I remember being desperate when discovering that a text book for my subject was not available. Art teachers like to devise their own very special curriculum, and I always had enjoyed doing so, but when it comes to teaching art in a foreign language, oh well, that’s a wholly different kettle of fish.
Even subject meetings organised by the European Platform turned out to be not very useful. I remember a fellow teacher who cavilled that he was not willing to share his work as “you never get anything in return.” Lees door »

Yesterday my newspaper drew my attention to a symposium to be held on Friday, 20 May 2011. The meeting will address recent developments on multilingualism and multilingual language acquisition. Unfortunately this news came too late for me to change my schedule for the week to come, but you may be interested in attending this event. Lees door »

As a subject teacher I focus on developing vocabulary within my subject, Art. Basically this is not different from teaching in the Dutch spoken classroom. I need the word “value” to describe how surfaces differ in reflecting light, just as I need “helderheid” for the same phenomenon in Dutch. The word is a gateway into experiencing the visual world. It is one of many words that build up a systematic word bank, “Visual Elements and Visual Principles.”

The Word Bank

Each subject comes with its own specialized words.  Lees door »

Students can be quite skittish about speaking in front of the class in English. I discovered that performing a hand puppet play is a great shot in the arm. First formers are vacillating between the magical world of early childhood and their budding rational mind. Having their puppet speaking instead of themselves somehow pushes them over the threshold. Lees door »

European Platform’s site mentions a number of 36 Dutch schools involved in the ELOS-programme. As my school opted out, I guess the correct number is 35. Lees door »

Het Departement Moderne Talen van de Universiteit Utrecht verzorgt de cursus Language Learning in de Educatieve Master. Hierin komen thema’s aan de orde zoals eerste- versus tweedetaalverwerving, natuurlijke versus gestuurde tweedetaalverwerving, verschillen tussen individuele leerders/leerlingen, tweetaligheid en taalverwerving, en taalleerstoornissen. Lees door »



Leraren en leerlingen leren op deze dag van de GLOBE wetenschappers hoe ze kunnen helpen met het doen van wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar  Natuurkalender, Water en Bodem. Lees door »

Recently we had an open day, of course meant to coax the young kids from our catchment area into believing that our school is the place to be.

We are in a fierce competition with some other schools, aggravated by a sure decline in student numbers within a couple of years due to depopulation of the rural area we work in. Lees door »