Years 7 and 8 Band Description
The nature of the learners
Students coming into this pathway are background learners of Turkish with varying degrees of proficiency in the language. All have family and community connections with the language and associated cultures, or with languages or dialects related to Turkish. Some may have recently arrived in Australia, may have completed the primary years of schooling in Turkish and may have established literacy as well as oracy skills in the language. Others will have participated in community language programs during these years and have some literacy capabilities. Others may have minimal experience of formal learning of Turkish, with no literacy proficiency and varying degrees of oral capabilities, depending on their home language environment. All students share the experience of belonging to worlds in which languages play a key role and diversity of language use is common. The curriculum takes into account the diversity of learners, ensuring that tasks and activities are flexible to cater for different language capabilities while being appropriately pitched to all learners’ cognitive and social levels.
Turkish language learning and use
Students use Turkish to interact with each other, the teacher and other speakers of the language, to access and exchange information, to express ideas and feelings, to compete and to cooperate in learning tasks and activities. They build vocabulary resources, grammatical knowledge and communicative capabilities such as active listening skills and interactional strategies through shared learning experiences that provide a context for purposeful language use and through focused learning episodes that develop understanding of language systems and an ability to use metalanguage. They use modelled and rehearsed language to compose and present different types of texts, for example, shared stories, media and hypermedia texts, songs, poems, reports or journal entries. They plan, draft and present imaginative and informative texts, design interactive events and participate in discussions. They make cross-curricular connections and explore intercultural perspectives and experiences. Learners use ICT to support their learning in increasingly independent and intentional ways, exchanging resources with each other and with learners in different contexts.
Contexts of interaction
Students interact primarily with each other and the teacher in class, with some access to broader Turkish-speaking networks in the school and local community. ICT resources, such as email, online chats or wikis, provide access to additional experiences of authentic communication, connecting learners’ social worlds with those of Turkish-speaking peers in other contexts. Learners have additional access to Turkish language experience through media, community events, websites, social media and radio streaming.
Texts and resources
Learners work with a range of texts designed for in-school learning of Turkish, such as textbooks, readers, literary texts, videos, online media resources and materials. They also access materials created for Turkish-speaking communities, such as songs, films, magazines and social media texts such as blogs and advertisements and websites. They interact with a range of texts created for different purposes, for example, informational, transactional, communicative, expressive and imaginative texts, and make connections between these text types in Turkish and the work they do around similar texts in the English learning area.
Features of Turkish language use
Learners recognise and use key elements of Turkish grammar, such as word order, positions of adjectives, adverbs and postpositions, and recognise how grammatical forms and functions are represented through agglutination. They apply the principles of vowel harmony, for example, when adding nominal case endings, -(e), -(i), -d(e), -d(e)n to nouns, such as ev-e, ev-i, ev-de, ev-den, ev-in. They understand and use simple verb tenses, using negation and affirmation and suffixes to form sentences, such as biliyorum/bilmiyorum, okur/okumaz, uyudu/uyumadı, geleceğim/gelmeyeceğim, gitmiş/gitmemiş. They use a range of adjectives, adverbs and postpositions to describe actions, places and people in their own texts, for example, mavi köşkte, Kısa saçlı biriydi, Çok dikkatli yürü, Dün sabah geldi ; and understand and use the conditional marker -s(e) and/or the word eğer in compound sentences, for example, Eğer kitap okursan hayal gücün gelişir. They develop their range of vocabulary to domains beyond their personal experience and interests, use and analyse grammatical forms and structures and develop awareness of how these shape textual features. They use descriptive and expressive language to create particular effects and engage interest. They develop language knowledge, processing strategies and understanding of text conventions and patterns to assist in comprehending unfamiliar texts. They make connections between texts and cultural contexts, identifying how values and perspectives are embedded in language and how language choices determine how people, issues and experiences are represented. They are aware of the nature of the relationship between languages and cultures, noticing, for example, how particular Turkish words or expressions ‘carry’ cultural values or experiences. They reflect on the nature of bicultural and multicultural experience, on how languages change in response to broader social and cultural shifts, and how they perceive their own identities as users of two or more languages in a multicultural society.
Level of support
Differentiated support is required for learners with different levels of oracy and literacy proficiency. All learners require opportunities to review and consolidate learning; different degrees of balance between consolidation work and provision of more challenging tasks ensure learners at different levels are catered for. Teachers provide scaffolding, modelling and material and resource support for the development of fluency and accuracy in spoken language and of grammatical and literacy capabilities. Learners are supported to develop autonomy as language learners and users, and to self-monitor and adjust language in response to their experience in different communicative contexts. They are encouraged to engage critically with resources such as websites and translating tools and other resources designed to strengthen their receptive and productive language use.
The role of English
Learners are encouraged to use Turkish whenever possible. English is used when appropriate for discussion, explanation, comparison and reflection, for example, when considering the nature and relationship of language and culture or in tasks which involve bilingual work that includes comparison and analysis of Turkish and English. The process of moving between and using both languages consolidates learners’ already established sense of what it means to be bilingual or multilingual and provides opportunities for reflection on the experience of living interculturally in intersecting language communities.