By Irene Rooks and Jeroen Benschop, primary Dutch teachers
During the Professional Development course the team met with key note speaker Dr. Liam Printer (known for his amazing podcast), who focusses his work on language teaching but also on motivation and engagement in the classroom.
Movement, storytelling, visuals
Throughout the course, the team reflected on how to create classrooms where students feel safe, engaged, and confident to experiment with language. By combining movement, storytelling, visuals, reading, and meaningful interaction, we aim to make Dutch lessons accessible and enjoyable for all learners.
Games and interactive activities
For the Dutch lessons in primary this means that students are exposed to large amounts of understandable Dutch through stories, visuals, gestures, repetition, conversations, games, and interactive activities. We should therefore carefully adapt our language so students can follow along, while gradually introducing new vocabulary and sentence structures step by step. We found out that language acquisition happens best when learners understand messages that are slightly above their current level.
We are excited to continue applying these strategies across our primary Dutch programme and to further support our multilingual community.