Years 5 and 6 Band Description
The nature of the learners
Students are expanding their social networks, experiences and communicative repertoires in both their first language and Italian. They continue to need guidance and participate in structured, collaborative tasks that both recycle and extend language. Students are gaining greater independence and becoming more conscious of their peers and social context. They are gaining awareness of the world around them and of the relationship of Australia with Italy and other Italian-speaking communities. They are noticing similarities and differences between Italian language and culture and their own.
Italian language learning and use
Students’ pronunciation, intonation and phrasing are more confident, and they access wider vocabulary resources and use non-verbal strategies appropriately to support communication. They participate in shared tasks and purposeful language experiences as well as focusing explicitly on language structures and systems, literacy skills and cultural elements of communication.
Oracy development at this level includes active listening to a range of input from different sources, and building interactional skills such as maintaining conversations, turn-taking, and contributing to discussions with observations and opinions. They learn skills in ‘reading’ language for cultural and contextual meaning. Individual and group oral-presentation and performance skills are developed through researching and organising information, rehearsing and resourcing the content of presentations, and selecting appropriate language to engage particular audiences.
Contexts of interaction
Learners use Italian with each other and the teacher for a range of purposes: exchanging information, expressing ideas and feelings, performing and responding to Italian texts and experiences. They use ICTs to interact with each other and with peers in Italian-speaking communities, exchanging resources and information, accessing music and media resources, and contributing to class activities such as a blog or webpage.
Texts and resources
Learners engage with a range of oral, written, multimodal and digital texts that are increasingly public in nature. They use cues and decoding strategies to assist comprehension and to make connections between contexts, ideas and language within and between texts. They create texts for a range of purposes and audiences, such as emails, dialogues, public signs, presentations and performances. With support, they build cohesion into their Italian production in terms of both content and expression.
Features of Italian language use
Students increase their range of Italian language vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and textual knowledge. They learn how to describe present and immediate future actions, situations and events using familiar verbs. They use adverbs, adjectives and prepositions to create more complex sentences. They develop a metalanguage to describe patterns, rules and variations in language structures.
Learners consider how language features and expressions reflect cultural values and experiences (for example, language variation relating to gender, generation, status or cultural context). This leads to considering their own ways of communicating and to thinking about personal and community identities, stereotypes and perspectives reflected in language.
Level of support
While learners work more independently at this level, ongoing support, including modelling and scaffolding, is incorporated into task activity. Ongoing feedback and review support the interactive process of learning. While first language capabilities are more developed than learners’ Italian language proficiency, learning tasks and experiences need to take account of both their second language linguistic level and their more general cognitive and social levels of development.
The role of English
The use of English, in conjunction with Italian, for discussion, reflection and explanation ensures the continued development of learners’ knowledge base and intercultural capability and provides opportunities for learners to share understanding and experiences.