This Lancaster Literacy Research Centre event will be a talk from Dr Gee Macrory, titled New orthographies in the Primary Languages Classroom.

Abstract:

Research with L1 English learners of French in England (see e.g. Woore, 2016) suggests that the new orthography presents a challenge to learners and that more attention needs to be paid to this in the classroom. Given the relatively recent introduction (2014) of compulsory language learning at age 7 in England, this is now an issue confronting all younger learners and their teachers. This talk will report on a small-scale project in one primary school, which investigated young children’s experiences of being exposed to the orthographies of French and Spanish. It aimed also to investigate teachers’ views of the introduction of a new orthography. The study points to the importance of understanding children’s perceptions of their own learning.

Event schedule:

15:00pm - Welcomes & introductions (please enter the meeting with your 'real' name as your display name, and your camera switched on, to allow us to all put faces to each others' names)

15:05 - Presentation from Speaker Name(s) (please turn your camera off and mute your microphone during the presentation)

15:40 - Discussion (please use the raise hand feature on Teams to indicate you would like to have a turn speaking and once asked to speak by an event facilitator, please un-mute your microphone and turn your camera on)

Presenter bio:

Dr Gee Macrory, formerly Principal Lecturer, is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at the Manchester Metropolitan University. She is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Education University, Heidelberg. Gee has extensive experience of language teacher education, in secondary and primary modern foreign languages, bilingualism and early language learning. Her most recent research is on the experiences of student teachers learning to teach foreign language literacy in primary and secondary classrooms, and young children’s perceptions of foreign language orthographies. She is currently Chair of CLiE (Committee for Linguistics in Education), a member of the BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) Executive, and a member of the RiPL team (Research in Primary Languages) where she is responsible for the pedagogy and teacher expertise strand (http://www.ripl.uk/pedagogy-and-teacher-expertise/).