As promised in last weeks’ article, I am pleased to write that the students attending the HAC Basketball event at UNIS last Thursday, enjoyed their chance to test their skills against opposing teams from other Hanoi based schools. We sent two teams to participate, both of which performed well, with wins and losses to their credit. It is no surprise to hear that the children were excellent ambassadors to the school, showing enthusiasm for their sport and great team spirit. Congratulations to everyone.
At the start of the week, members of our leadership team joined delegates from our 12 NAE schools across SE Asia at our annual conference held in Bangkok. Over two days we were able to attend a variety of workshops, collaborate, and share good practice so that we can collectively make improvements to our schools. One pertinent area of discussion was on ‘Translanguaging’ and how effective a model it is to support emerging bilinguals develop both their mother tongue and their additional language, which of course in our case is English. The basis of this theory, unique to our BVIS model, is that the brain does not compartmentalize language, but instead a bilingual will have a repertoire of both languages to draw upon and therefore needs to be allowed to access either, at all times, in order to be able to construct complex sentences. It is this process of translanguaging, used every day during lesson delivery, that provides our students with the best possible opportunity to develop both Vietnamese and English languages to an age appropriate level. There is a growing bank of research material about translanguaging available on the internet which is worth exploring.
Have a restful weekend.
