How can all English-speaking children become bilingual in elementary school (even without bilingual teachers)? By giving them the world's easiest and most intercultural language first, for: cognitive advantages, confidence, motivation, transferable skills and global perspective. See how!

1. Every Child, Every Opportunity
a presentation to the Victorian Department for Education and ECD

2. For brain development,
for literacy,
for perspective,
for empathy,
for self-concept,
for opportunity...
What teachers do,
we do for them
LOTE
is an opportunity for
all children

3. “Every
Opportunity” is a
special challenge
within LOTE as
different
languages offer
different
opportunities,
as well as common
benefits to different
extents.

4. • There are 453 000
children in Victorian
primary schools:
• 333 000 study a LOTE,
27%
73%
☹
☺
Missing Out!
• 120 000 (mostly rural)
do not.
(VDEECD statistics)

5. Teachers are the Key
Teachers must know:
•what and how to teach, and
•be available to teach, under
the prevailing conditions.
•“Focusing on linguistic knowledge
appears to neglect the need for
teachers to be able to impart that
knowledge to students and trivialises
the teaching knowledge needed to do
so.“ Simpson Norris Pty Ltd for
NALSAS taskforce 1999

6. Generalists Do Everything
Why not empower them to introduce LOTE?
10%
10%
20%
10%
10%
10%
10%
20%
English Arts Science
HSIE LOTE Maths
HDPE Tech
They introduce future
physicists to science,
future artists to art, and
future cellists to
music....

7. A response to many calls for innovation:
“a universal apprenticeship in
learning how to learn languages”
• Lo Bianco and Slaughter’s “Second Languages
and Australian Schooling” review concludes
that the second of “four components of a
broad strategy” should be “a universal
apprenticeship in learning how to learn
languages” in the primary years, so that
students will “successfully transfer such skills
to other languages”
• This 2-step process will enable many more
children to to master a target language.

8. Equipping generalist teachers to provide
the world’s most accessible LOTE can
redress the inequities long before 2020,
using the available time (even if it is
sometimes only 200 hours in the whole
of primary school !)
E$PERANTO:affordablecommunication

9. Empowering Change
These materials were
developed, by and for
Australian primary
generalist teachers, to
enable them to learn
Esperanto while
teaching the entire
working language to
their classes.

10. Side-Benefits of Integrating Primary LOTE
• Seriousness and stability
• Less opportunity cost, so more acceptance
• Functional bilingualism before end of primary
• Continuity, completion and a head start in
secondary LOTE.
• Sound values, meeting others halfway.
• Flexibility for later engagement with
community and commercial languages.

11. Bilingual and ready for more
Thank you for your attention

12. About the Author
Penelope Vos (BSc Dip Ed) is a teacher, author and CEO of
Mondeto Educational Resources.
She is a graduate of Murdoch University and the Montessori World Education
Institute, and has twenty years of teaching experience, in Science, Art and Esperanto
in private, public and religious schools.
Her most recent books are "Australian LOTE: Achieving Broad and Deep Competence
in Languages at School" (2007) and "Talking to the Whole Wide World" (2009), a stand-
alone resource to equip primary school generalists to teach a second language to
fluency, in a context of global intercultural awareness, without prior training.
The International Montessori Conference, 2010 will see the launch of the long-in-
development “Talking to the Whole Wide World” Montessori Materials.
Thank you