On Tuesday 3 August, 2021 we delivered our statewide staff meeting with guest presenter Kate Thompson, Stage 6 Advisor. Thank you to the teachers who joined us for the live session. For those who weren’t able to make it, the recording is now live on our YouTube channel and the slide deck is attached.
We will continue with our Stage 6 focus in our Week 7 meeting with guest presenter Adele Burke, Senior Assessment Officer, Examining and Testing, NESA.

The Languages and Culture team is seeking input from our regional and remote language teachers regarding our planned Term 3 2021 conference. This is a targeted event for language teachers 7-12 in rural and remote public schools who do not have a local geographic network available to them.

We would like to find out your preferences regarding:

• - format of the conference
• - timing of the conference
• - areas of professional learning needs.

We would appreciate your feedback in completing this survey by 5 pm, Friday 6 August. It takes about 1 minute to complete.
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We will be in touch soon about our Semester 2 professional learning plans.

If you have any questions please contact Coreena Allen or Evia Kyriacou.

NESA's 2022 HSC exam development application is still open – you can find more information on the NESA website. 

• Chief Examiner – closing date Wednesday 14 July 2021.
• Committee member – closing date Friday 13 August 2021.
• Assessor applications – closing date Friday 12 November 2021.

SICLE is organising a number of language specific PL events, focusing on strategies for online language learning. All events will be advertised on the Open Language Portal under the Resources for All Languages button and all teachers are welcome. Currently on the Portal there is information about free online workshops, for Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Hindi. More will be added in the coming weeks. 
You can also explore sample programming resources, as well as generic resources that may be useful for the teaching and learning of all languages.

​We have added a new page to our website – Teaching tools – where you can find information on feedback, learning journals and a new support document on visible thinking in languages.

This document supports our recent statewide staffroom, and we’ve had lots of requests from teachers wanting more, so we hope you like what we’ve done. Visible thinking tools and strategies in the languages classroom can lead to increased student engagement and deeper levels of understanding, so we think our support document is a ‘must-read’, as part of Elective PD.

We explore how to create a culture of thinking in your classroom, tools and strategies you can use, and provide explicit links to teaching and learning activities on our website.

​Stage 6 Literacy in context – Writing in languages is now live! This suite of resources is designed to support student writing development in languages based on current research to support student literacy.
These Stage 6 resources have been created to enable teachers to use content they are working with in class to improve the quality of students' written responses in English (to a stimulus text in the target language) and in student responses in the language they are learning. They contain videos and downloadable activities on subject vocabulary, planning for writing and student writing and feedback.
You can use these resources individually, as a faculty, or as part of a whole-school literacy team. By using these resources, you can also register hours for Elective PD.

Our statewide staff meeting in Week 4 will explore the requirements for developing Stage 6 monitoring procedures. Join us on Tuesday 3 August, 4-5 pm, to hear from the Stage 6 Advisor, Kate Thompson, from the Department of Education. 

We will explore: 
- NESA requirements and legislation
- the department's HSC monitoring advice
- what schools must do 
- what records to maintain 
- staff responsibilities.

You must enrol in the session on MyPL to receive the link to the online meeting. Search for course code NR29242, and select the session for Tuesday 3 August. 

The link for each statewide staff meeting is different, so you do need to enrol in each session we offer.

We look forward to seeing you there! The session will be recorded for those unable to join us. 

If you haven't joined our statewide staffroom yet, please complete our short entry survey to join. Log in using your department email.

We are very, VERY excited to announce that we have just published 3 new resources for Stage 6 Latin:

• - a sample assessment task for the Preliminary course on Catullus poem 50
• - HSC examination in Latin Continuers – advice for students
• - HSC examination in Latin Extension – advice for students.

Please note that we published an earlier version of the sample assessment task, however we had to make some changes to the outcomes and the marking guidelines. Some of these changes were to enable students to access the task as a practice, without providing them with any answers. We also included more background information for teachers. If you had previously downloaded a copy of the task, please discard it and replace it with the new version.

You can access this new support from our Latin Stage 6 page.

The Sydney South West Language Teacher Network will hold its Term 3 meeting on Wednesday 21 July. The focus of the meeting will be to get to know each other and sharing strategies for learning from home.

Enrol via MyPL.
Course code: NR18042
Enrolments close: 21 July at 9 am
Date: Wednesday 21 July 2021
Time: 2-3 pm
Venue: Online

The link to the meeting will be sent on the morning of 21 July. For more information and details, contact the network leader Adele Walker. ​

Dear language teachers,

As you are delving into learning from home once more, please take a look at the support the Languages and Culture team has on offer.

- Are you part of our Languages statewide staffroom on Teams yet? It takes less than a minute to join by filling out this brief entry survey. Our staffroom has over 680 DoE teachers connecting with each other. You will be able to ask questions, access direct support from the Languages and Culture team and explore over 690 teacher-shared resources for Stages 4-6. There is also access to our curriculum resources and our YouTube channel. If you are a user of Yammer, you will be able to access that through the staffroom too. It's a one-stop shop.

- If you are looking for support with Stage 6, our curriculum website has sample speaking questions and sample reading and listening activities for most modern languages and courses, organised by topics. 

- The Department of Education is continuously updating the Learning from home website adding resources for all subjects and levels.

Thank you for all your hard work always. Please reach out to any member of our team for any kind of support. 

Languages and Culture team