Across Cultures, which delivers the Learning Village, will be working with New Zealand’s Ministry of Education to deliver a comprehensive ‘virtual classroom’ ESOL programme. They’ll be operating in state schools in all areas of the country, for a minimum of three years.

It’s not entirely uncharted territory for Across Cultures: the Learning Village has been active in New Zealand for the last few years.

The New Zealand virtual ESOL classroom

Across Cultures will be delivering the Learning Village - an effective, accelerated English language learning programme - for students aged 7-13 years in New Zealand. As part of their contract, they will provide extensive support to schools, to target learners who are new learners of English.

The Learning Village is a blended learning programme used in schools all over the world, across four continents. It steadily builds competence in English, covering speaking and listening, reading and writing, and progressing in clear steps through an image-based approach. It’s an innovative and hugely successful programme, with unique resources, tools and support. The Learning Village includes:

• three programmes of learning: Survival language, Phonics and Curriculum content, customized to individual pupils and to individual schools’ curricula
• new-to-literacy resources to support students who have no literacy at all, building their competence step by step
• a wealth of activities associated with every step, including games, flashcards and substitution tables
• the Learning Village translation tool, which allows translation up to 100 of the most common languages
• the Learning Village Sentence Analyser, which lets teachers break down sentences using substitution tables, to support connection to the curriculum
• the Learning Village Sentence Visualiser, which generates whole sentences in images
• the Learning Village offline text-based resources, which scaffold language from word level right up to independent writing.

The Learning Village ensures that teachers’ expertise is at the centre of the learning process. Teachers assign their students individual pathways through the programme, aligning these to their school’s curriculum. Independent learning is backed up by small-group teaching, with teachers interpreting results to map out their learners’ future direction. The Learning Village provides all the tools and training to do this and to support differentiation for EAL in the classroom.

From February, Across Cultures will deliver initial and follow-up training, as well as continual remote support, to teachers and teaching assistants across New Zealand. It is hoped that New Zealand teachers and learners will find the Learning Village as successful a programme as their counterparts in many other countries across the world.

For more information about this project sign up for the newsletter or follow us on Twitter: @AxCulturesNZ .