Case Study

Introduction

Smithy Street School in East London has cooperated with the local Community Language Service for some time, by providing after-school language classes on its premises. It has more recently extended this partnership by providing Bengali lessons during curriculum time as part of the entitlement for Primary Languages at Key Stage 2.

After-school provision for Bengali

A large number of Bengali speakers live in the local community. Parents are keen for their children to learn their mother tongue as it underpins the children’s cultural heritage and supports their linguistic development. In 1999 the Tower Hamlets Youth and Community Service was established and combined with the Agrani Youth Project in the Stepney Green area. As part of their programme a mother tongue project at Smithy Street School was set up.

In 2004 the Tower Hamlets Mother Tongue Service took responsibility for the project and built up a partnership with Smithy Street School. Since this time, the school has built on its strong links with the Bangladeshi community in the Stepney area and a number of Bangladeshi children attend after school classes twice a week for two hours to learn their mother tongue, Bengali.

The partnership has allowed Smithy Street School to build strong links with the Bangladeshi community in the area. The school aims to give recognition to the cultural diversity of its intake, valuing the language itself and the part it plays in affirming the children’s sense of identity.

Approximately 20 children aged between 7 and 13 attend the 2-hour after-school classes twice a week, with the aim of developing their oracy, literacy and creative skills. The classes also provide the children with tangible benefits in terms of their education as a whole. The overall achievements of those who attend the community language classes are seen to be significantly higher than those children who do not attend. For example, the use of ICT programmes to supplement the delivery of Bengali has significantly improved students’ general ICT skills.

The school and the local community now intend to extend the links with each other through further projects.

Monitoring progress

The children’s performance is planned and assessed using the Tower Hamlets Standard Curriculum Framework for Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, and the Mother Tongue Scheme of Work produced by the Tower Hamlets Community Language Service. This service has a strategy to monitor both the delivery of lessons and the progress in children’s work, so that the school’s high standards are maintained. A range of language websites are also consulted, which allows the classes to benefit from the ideas and resources of other community language teaching providers.

The project has been highly successful due to the continuing support provided by Smithy Street School and the Community Language Service. Despite limited funding, lessons are regular, of a consistently high standard, and pupil attendance has been good. The project has brought the children, parents and school together and a real partnership has formed between them and the wider community. Further resources would be welcome, as there is as yet no collaboration between this project and other language experiences the children may have – for example, learning Arabic at the Mosque and, for those children who do not attend Smithy Street any other languages learnt at school.

For this reason, the school and local community intend to extend the links with each other through further projects, one of which has been the teaching of Bengali during school time as a modern foreign language.

Teaching Bengali within school hours

In September 2007, Smithy Street School started a pilot scheme to teach Bengali to all children in Key Stage 2 as a modern foreign language, following the National Languages Strategy. Between 30 minutes and 1 hour of curriculum time is now spent learning Bengali. The decision to run the scheme was supported by both parents and children attending the school.

Interviews were held with the children, which revealed that they wanted to learn Bengali so that they were able to communicate with classmates in and out of school. Since Bengali is the main language of the community, it was felt to be relevant to all the pupils despite the fact that a proportion of them speak Syhleti as the first language – a dialect of Bengali with no written form. It is considered important to be able to communicate in Standard Bengali in order to allow greater access to Bengali culture, to converse with contacts or relatives in Bangladesh, and as a useful skill in their future lives.

A parents meeting was also organised to involve parents in the decision to deliver Bengali as the main language at Key Stage 2. After much discussion and input on the cultural and educational value of the proposed project, it was agreed that teaching should begin for all classes from Year 3 to Year 6. The lessons would follow the objectives of the Key Stage 2 Framework for Languages, incorporating its 5 strands: Oracy, Literacy, Intercultural Understanding, Knowledge about Language and Language Learning Strategies.

The success of this scheme, as well as the after-school classes, has ignited a greater interest in languages amongst teachers, parents and pupils. Smithy Street School is now considering running an additional after-school club, to offer a European language for the benefit of pupils and other children from the area.

About the School