At Cranbourne East Secondary College, our LOTE (language other than English) subject endeavours to provide students not only with the Mandarin language skills, but also a cultural awareness of the Chinese speaking community.
At CESC, Mandarin is taught and practiced through a variety of topics, such as:
- Greeting and Farewell
- Self-introduction
- Family
- Numbers
- Jobs
- Arts and Crafts
- Sports
- Festivals
- Food
LOTE is a semester-based subject in Years 7 and 8. From Year 9 onwards, LOTE (Mandarin) is an elective, where students can extend their study of the Chinese language, social structures, traditions and contemporary cultural practices of diverse Chinese-speaking communities.
Through various classroom activities we aim to develop students’ language proficiency and promote intercultural understanding. What is more, our goal is to prepare our students with a global outlook, who have deepened knowledge and understanding of Australia’s engagement with Asia.
Why LOTE?
“Languages contribute materially to the universal purposes of schooling and to the development of skills in thinking and reflection. They support the moral, social and economic initiation of young people into the culture and wider civilisation that surrounds them. Learning a language nurtures reflective, deep and creative thinking in specific ways, cultivates culturally distinctive fields of knowledge, and stimulates awareness of intellectual functioning. In unique ways, languages require learners to engage in self-reflection because effective communication in a new language requires the learner to move outside the norms, practices and acquired behaviours of their first language. “