Sydney Institute for Community Languages Education Newsletter Semester 1 2024
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Welcome to the first Sydney Institute for Community Languages (SICLE) newsletter. This newsletter will be published once a semester, giving you up to date information about SICLE and the programs and research we conduct. As this is the first newsletter, please forward this email onto anyone you think would like to subscribe, you can subscribe here.
In this newsletter
What is SICLE?
Meet the SICLE team
Community language school programs
Open languages website
Project officers
MTeach website
Language Proficiency Tests
Language progressions
Our research
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What is SICLE?
Sydney Institute for Community Languages Education (SICLE) was established in 2017, funded by the NSW government to provide support for community languages schools, to develop pathways for teachers into further study and employment and to develop an evidence base for the schools and languages policy.
We support and research linguistic diversity in Australia. Our work informs policy and evidence-based language teaching approaches. We also provide professional pathways for teachers and support community language students through the development of curriculum resources and assessments. For more information about SICLE see our USYD SICLE website.
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Meet the SICLE Team
The SICLE team is led by Professor Ken Cruickshank, learn more about our team by clicking on the staff pictures below.
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What we offer teachers in community language schools
SICLE has been running its 60-hour professional learning programs for volunteer teachers in NSW community languages schools for 16 years. Over 3,500 teachers have now successfully completed the programs which introduce teachers to teaching in Australia. The most popular aspects of the program are when teachers visit mainstream primary schools; when they visit each other’s schools and when they have language-specific classes. We know that about half of the teachers have experience teaching overseas and the majority have tertiary qualifications. What they have in common is that community language school teachers want more knowledge and experience of teaching in Australia.
SICLE’s professional learning programs are going full steam ahead this year.
We have broken them into two semesters with four Foundation programs in Semester 1 and four in Semester 2, an Advanced program in each semester and, the Leadership and Management program in Semester 2. We have had over 165 applications for the 120 places in the Foundation programs and have managed to get interest from communities that were previously not involved.
These programs are free to community language teachers and completion of the programs can contribute to advanced standing or credit into M/Teach programs at Western Sydney University.
In 2023 we also ran the Foundation Professional Learning Program for community language teachers in the ACT.
For more information about these professional learning programs please click here
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Resources for schools
It is impossible to find up-to-date Australian resources in languages. SICLE established the Open Languages portal to bring together available resources to support teaching both in out-of-hours community languages schools and primary and secondary schools. This portal is for everyone teaching community languages, but especially for the 3,000 volunteer teachers in NSW community languages schools. There are currently over 2000 resources on the portal for Arabic, Assyrian/Chaldean, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian/Dari, Punjabi, Tamil, Turkish, Vietnamese and many more languages. The resources are categorised in topics and by proficiency level. Access the Open Languages portal. In upcoming newsletters, we will focus on resources that have been created for community language schools.
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Language specific support
SICLE works with 20 project officers across 12 languages providing targeted language specific support to community language teachers and students. The Project Officers develop and curate resources for the Open Language Portal,facilitate language specific professional learning and work closely with the schools to extend and build professional networks. Language specific events the Project Officers are organising this year include a Vietnamese student showcase to be held on April 13th and a Chinese Teachers’ conference to be held at Sydney University on July 13th.
In upcoming newsletters project officers will give updates on resources, workshops and conferences they have worked on in their language.
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 Doing something about the teacher shortage
With the current crisis in teachers across Australia, SICLE is playing a key role in providing pathways for volunteer community languages schools becoming accredited teachers. The MTeach website, launched in 2020 addresses the huge information gap in providing information to teachers on pathways to becoming NESA accredited teachers.
Our most recent initiative is for existing and prospective primary and secondary teachers to add languages as an additional teaching method. We offer the language proficiency test (see below) plus a 45hr online methodology program and 15-day practicum.
Teachers can book information sessions and submit expressions of interest in three categories:
| |  Language Proficiency Tests (LPT)
SICLE offers the Language Proficiency Tests online via The University of Sydney’s learning management system Canvas and face to face at The University of Sydney. We currently provide the test in 15 languages (Arabic, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Samoan, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish and Vietnamese) We are currently developing tests for an additional 5 languages (Punjabi, Macedonian, Persian/Dari, Khmer and Hebrew) and will be holding these tests for the first time on 23rd November 2024 face to face. When we have sufficient demand, we will develop new tests for languages we don’t currently have the test for.
If you are interested in completing the test, navigate to our LPT webpage where you can register for upcoming tests. If the language that you wish to complete the test in isn’t available please fill out our expression of interest form and we will email you back with upcoming tests dates.
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 Language progressions
SICLE has been funded by the Department of Education NSW to develop language progressions for Chinese and Arabic. The Language learning progressions are classroom/teacher-based assessment tools which bring together teaching and curriculum. They describe student achievement and the development of language learning. The progressions are research-based and evidence-informed, they align with current syllabuses and support teaching and learning. The draft prototype of the milestones and indicators has been developed by Michael Michell based on extensive research into progressions and first/ second and heritage language development especially in Chinese and Arabic.
Michael is an expert in the area of language assessment and was involved in the work on the ESL Scales and Victorian TEAL Project.
We have gained the collaboration of international experts in these languages, Professor Yuan Boping from Cambridge University, Dr. Mohammed Mahgoub from University of London, Dr. Linda Tsung and Dr. Nadia Selim from Sydney University. These researchers have reviewed the language milestones and continue as advisors on the project.
Since the draft progressions have been written the next step has been the engagement of key primary and secondary language teachers to review the milestones and develop draft indicators for each milestone. We have conducted three writing workshops with experienced (K-12) teachers of Arabic and Chinese. These teachers reviewed the milestones in terms of their practical classroom knowledge and experience. They then assessed work samples in terms of the milestones and annotated these work samples. This led to the development of indicators.
The next step is to work with an expanded group of Arabic and Chinese teachers, including community language teachers, to further refine the indicators and to train these teachers in using the progressions. We are planning for this workshop to be held in the Term 1 holidays. The progressions will be trialled in about 10 school across Terms 2 and 3 and further revisions will be made.
To view the current draft milestones please visit our language progression wiki.
| |  How to engage students... Drama
Community Languages Schools compete with sport and other extra-curricular activities, so teachers have to be up-to-date and engaging in their teaching. Forty community languages teachers from 12 different language backgrounds completed a 6-week drama program taught by Zoe Hogan and Dr. Victoria Campbell from SSESW. The teachers had varying exposure to drama but what they had in common is their desire to engage their students in learning. Zoe and Victoria got the participants to bring along traditional stories from their cultural/ language backgrounds and they developed ways to use these with their own students. They learned and shared new teaching strategies with each other.
Connecting through Drama – Currency Press
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 | Community Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education
Although Community Languages schools run worldwide with over some 2 million students, there has been no research that looks at this sector of schooling across national borders. Routledge has just published Community Heritage Language Schools Transforming Education which brings together 20 researchers from 15 different countries: SICLE has put out the first international study of community languages schools.
| |  | Children under five in community languages schools
Many parents want their children to have exposure to languages before they begin kindergarten: over 25% of community languages schools have early childhood learners. This area has never been researched internationally. Dr Beatriz Cardona, who combines expertise in Early Childhood education with a background in languages education, has started work on a national survey and interviewing community language teachers. The aim of the project is to explore the strengths and needs of community languages schools for teaching young learners. SICLE is working with authorities around Australia and there has been much interest.
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There has traditionally been no little contact across national borders in terms of community languages schools and research. SICLE has established the Tertiary Working Party for NSW/ACT which meets three times a year for some 30 researchers across 15 universities to share their work in Community languages. We have also established a national group of researchers who have collaborated in presentations at national education and linguistics conference. SICLE was a founding member of the HL Global Think Tank | HLE Network an International Think Tank of community languages researchers which now has over 20 members from 13 countries. We will be keynote presenters at the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Languages Schools in October 2024 in Washington DC.
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