LONDON, UK, March 11, 2008: Children Newbury Park Primary School learn key phrases in more than 40 languages – all spoken fluently by one or more pupils at the school. By the time they leave for secondary school, they boast far more than a mere smattering of French or Cantonese.
They can say something in everything from Afrikaans to Hebrew, Japanese to Norwegian. Classes start by greeting each other in that month’s chosen language. Teachers say Newbury Park’s “language of the month” program has also helped tackle the sense of alienation felt by newcomers to the school in Redbridge, East London. In little more than a decade, the proportion of pupils at the school who do not speak English at home has doubled to 80 per cent.
The biggest ethnic group are Tamils who have fled the civil war in Sri Lanka. “You have 250 Tamil children in the school. It is just polite to greet them in their own language and recognize their culture,” said teacher Joe Debono, who runs the language scheme. “It gives the children a lot of self-esteem,” he explains. “And it is a way of celebrating the ethnic diversity of the school and not seeing it as a problem.”