Languages Corner

Bonjour, Shalom and こんにちは to you all. On behalf of the languages department, I hope you've had a restful and fun start to the new year. My name is Erin Cavanagh and, as the new head of languages at GEC this year, I'm beyond excited to see where our language learning takes our school community. I've been learning French for 22 years and Japanese for 6, and I can safely say, learning a second and third language has changed the way I see myself and the world. It's our hope that, this year, all our students will get to experience this same curiosity, excitement and challenge that comes with exploring a new language.

 

We are excited to welcome back the tuition of Hebrew at Year 7 with our new teacher Meital Gofman. Our team are busy at work conjuring up exciting opportunities for our students to not only celebrate language learning but also embrace the diverse cultures in our community.

 

In the coming weeks the Year 7 students studying French will be taking part in our annual Alliance Francaise French Film Festival Excursion. Our classes will also spend time using new language they've learnt in class to describe the characters and plot... in French! We're also eagerly awaiting the publication of the poems for the Berthe Mouchette Poetry Competition. Every year, each of our French classes engage in Francophone culture and language by learning a French poem off by heart and reciting it in front of one of the Alliance Francaise examiners. We always look forward to the challenge of this yearly ritual and to seeing our students represent our school in this century-old tradition.   

 

Yet another exciting opportunity presented itself last week as we welcomed the visit of an International Cosplay artist, Ms Christine Busby, and Consul-General Matsunaga from the Japanese Consul who spoke to our students. Christine is a cosplayer (a performative artist) who was part of the winning Australian team at the World Cosplay Championship held in Japan last year. Our Japanese immersion classes had the chance to listen to her experiences in this competition. She also spoke about her work as a Japanese-English translator and her time in the Japanese anime and film industry.

 

Our Year 7 students are settling into our Japanese and French Immersion programs beautifully. The Japanese Immersion classes are learning to conquer the Japanese alphabets and are making amazing progress learning about a range of scientific processes. Our new French teacher Madame Genovese is teaching our Year 7C French-Humanities class about the intricacies of Viking life and culture and in French LOTE classes, we are learning to describe our heroes.

 

We can't wait to see more of you at our Languages Open Night and look forward to making more leaps and bounds in our language adventures this term. 

 

Erin Cavanagh

Head of Languages