Session 5 and 6

 

Alright, where do I start, Well todays iteration cycle was a good session. I felt like my participants really understood the  vocabulary that they highlighted in the previous session stating they dont understand it. Now with the Gagana Samoa one word could mean many things however in this instance we focused on the context of their speeches which I refer to as the situation. This allowed students to focus solely on the meaning of these words in a specific context. The engagement was there, the communicative skills we there based on my observations students were talking and trying to make sense of the flipped task and connect this to their prior-knowledge. I can definitely see the importance of cummins quadrant framework which seperates the idea of context embedded tasks vs context reduced tasks. I see there is a very important place for this in the bilingual space, especially linking this frame to a task based approach where the focus is not solely on completing the but solely dependent on students finding meaning in the target language. Wow I really enjoyed creating this task for my students where they got the opportunity to mix and match Gagana Samoa word, English word and visual. It was great to see students talk about the visuals which supported them in making their own interpretations, and finding what matches. The question now comes to mind where this rotational model of bilingual education where teachers are delivering the curriculum through Gagana Samoa on one day and than English on another day, Now today I witnessed both languages, in action input and output were both in Gagana Samoan and English during one block and I found this very beneficial with the participants I deliberately selected. Then it raises this question about why seperate languages into slots of days? I dont know if this is relevant, but its my thoughts at this point in time. Why cant the senior students, experience teaching through a language using both languages at the same time through out the day? 

Session 3 and 4

 

You know what I came to a realisation that I think I am targeting too much for my Masters programme. when I reflect back on the 3 questions I have chosen I believe its too much for me to research about let alone implement with my group of students. 

Flipped learning approaches is where there needs to be a bigger focus in delivery. Now on the third iteration we looked at vocabulary and phrases that the students needs to find meanings to or in this case discuss the meanings with their peers, this acted as the flipped task the students needed to complete before looking at the introduction of their speeches. Now I found that there was no connection between the flipped task and the teacher task which was fairly overlooked in my mind. Now even though this was the case it was very interested to see the student discuss these terms and phrases I deliberately chose from the their speeches. I watched and observed and there was some relevant information being shared and some information that was way off in terms of meaning. This is expected based on the data I collected where students noted that they either understood some information or just memorised the speeches. 

Fourth iteration they participated in a Gagana Samoa Assessment which I created myself. I did this because I wanted to test them in the beginning of our cycles and than look to assess them again towards the end. Now this will determine whether their would be academic progress in between with understanding Gagana Samoa content. I have yet to still look at their assessments and their completed flipped tasks. 

I checked the teacher activity the students did which was to find differences and similarities in the introduction only of their speeches, they Identified the key areas of this introduction. 

First and Second Session

 

My first iteration was completed on the 6th of August 2025, Now I have 9 participants who have signed a consent form confirming their participation in this project. Now before I get into this reflection about my actions, I wanted to touch base about the speech therapist I ran into while waiting for the students to arrive. She showed some interest in what I was doing after I explained to her what my goal is. You know the power of Talanoa is real. It's not until you voice to someone what you are doing that you find that you understand more about why you are carrying out this project. The gem I took away from this conversation was the importance of learning Gagana Samoa for our New Zealand born students who in most cases do not get the Gagana at home. So providing rich activities for them to learn Gagana Samoa in class is important to me. You will get students who are immersed at home with the Gagana Samoa vs Students who don't get the Gagana at all and not to mention students who do get the Gagana but not through deep and meaningful interactions.  This is what my project is really about, being able to provide rich and meaningful experiences where students learn and improve their Gagana Samoa, through reading, writing and speaking. After this conversation I self-regulated my thoughts and spoke to myself about whether or not I should have chosen a group of students that were not getting the Gagana Samoa at home vs those students that are? eh! Yes I had a eh moment lol in Samoan we call this a "Why didn't I think of this prior to starting". Oh well it is actually too late to change it now because I have already started and time is actually on my side at the moment. Now in saying this it was interesting to find out that the students that were getting Gagana Samoa at home did not know what some of the vocabulary were in Gagana Samoa which kind of made sense to in a way that even though they are getting Gagana Samoa at home it may not be in the context of learning, or a context in which students have no experience in. If that makes any sense. e.g being stranded, fishing, students would only know these words if they have been exposed to the experiences. 

First Iteration, Well I can definitely say that I felt really good again to be in front of students, teaching again. It made me realise how much I miss the teacher to students interaction. We started off with an Ice-breaker just to break the ice a bit before getting into some Literacy. Students enjoyed the ice-breaker which definitely gave them the focus they needed to complete the task. I gave them a passage in English to read. After they read this passage they had a short discussion talking about what this passage was about. I then removed this passage and gave them questions related to the characters and how they are processing the event of being stranded out in sea for 3 months. Before they did this activity they did a flipped task for me which was to unpack the meaning of content vocabulary. This gave the opportunity for students to discuss and talk about the target vocabulary before actually reading the passage that contains the vocabulary in it. This flipped task also needed the students to find the Gagana Samoa words for the words I gave out. Very interesting to see the awesome discussion amongst the students trying to find the Gagana Samoa words, for the English words. Like the English Language there are many words that can explain or describe the meaning of words. 

Students also needed to clarify with their peers and teacher, you know this is the learning talk we are trying to encourage with students and this flipped approach gives the children the chance to dig deep into their prior knowledge and talk their way through their thinking. It was also good to see the students made connections with their heritage language and be able to understand the passage more because they had the chance to talk about the target vocabulary first. Once they completed this, what happened was they were given a task to write down all the main points about the short passage using your Gagana Samoa. Here I was wanting to use teaching for transfer where we use one language for input and another language for output. 

Reading some of their responses I can definitely see the connection between the flipped task and the actual teaching task I used. They automatically used the vocabulary they explored during their flipped tasks in their explanations. In some instances the girls have written more than the boys and when reading it the girls had more in depth knowledge about the passage, Why though? Could be the barrier between understanding and knowing how to write their understanding using the correct Gagana Samoa vocabulary and structure? If I was to ask them to write it in English would they have not written more? Probably there is a high chance they would but what's the focus of my project? It's to improve Gagana Samoa through the use of all learning modes, reading, writing and speaking. 

Iteration 2 

This session was good for my understanding. We started with a Whakawhanaungatanga activity followed by time to complete a flipped learning task, and then  got stuck into looking at one of the Gagana Speeches to check student understanding of the speech. Now it was very awesome to hear students' responses on what they understood and what they didn’t understand. One of the words they didn’t understand was the word Fa’avae. They could explain it or express what this word meant even after reading it in a sentence. Now this word is a good example of the motto Samoa uses on their national Emblem  which states “Fa’avae Le Atua Samoa”. Now this word pretty much means foundation, which is an academic word used to describe strong value, or in other words a house with a strong foundation. Now students didn’t understand this word. 

This did confirm for me that students are not understanding what they are speaking about in Gagana Samoa, and I can definitely confirm that this is something that is also evident in the English language as well, but It's a challenge we face as teachers, the question is what actions do I take that would support students with understanding these types of academic language in Gagana Samoa so students have that understanding. 

I remember this Deputy Principal I meet a couple of years ago telling me that there was this student who was in a bilingual unit, they were going through this educational pathway and towards the end of year 8 she told this Deputy Principal that she had no idea what her language meant she didn’t understand anything that was being taught in that specific language. All that student was doing was just participating in the language but had no idea what the songs meant, what the books meant. Now I believe this is relevant to what occurred in my session today. 

Where too from here? Well first I need to support these students in understanding their Gagana Samoa speeches through unpacking the Gagana Samoa, language features and vocabulary being used in a specific context. 

Upon looking at the chosen speech we used to see where students understandings were at I could see alot of similarities in what the students did not understand from the chosen speech. They all pretty much highlighted the words and phrases they did not understand.