Bilingual Education is the foundation upon which all teaching and learning at Huntingdale is placed. As you scroll through the information located in the website you will quickly realise that bilingualism is more than just knowing how to understand, speak, read and write in two languages. 
 
PROMOTING A BILINGUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT AT HUNTINGDALE PRIMARY SCHOOL
The school is transitioning from a 30/70 model where we deliver 70% of the curriculum in English and 30% in Japanese (still in use in grades 4 to 6) to a 50/50 model where students learn 50% of the curriculum in English and 50% in Japanese. Grades Foundation to 3 have already transitioned to the new model

JAPANESE AND ENGLISH LITERACY (CLIL) APPROACH AT HUNTINGDALE PRIMARY SCHOOL
The school promotes bilingual collaboration between the English teacher and the Japanese teacher using CLIL – Content and Language Integrated Learning – approach to enhance the productive language of students.

Speaking in the Language You Know Best
We know that many of our students come to school knowing another language other than English or Japanese. Huntingdale Primary School and the Department of Education recognise that maintaining your child’s first language is important.

Benefits of Bilingual Education
Much has been written about the benefits of the bilingual brain. In particular, stimulating the sections of the brain which develop language competencies from an early age, has been shown to lead to other academic improvements. Researchers have shown that the bilingual brain can have better attention and task-switching abilities than the monolingual brain. To achieve a balance between the two languages, the brain relies on executive functions as the bilingual brain’s language systems are always active, deciding which language to receive the information in and which language to produce the response in, leading to receptive and productive language abilities. Bilingualism has been linked with improved metalinguistic awareness (the comparison of language systems), as well as with better memory, visual-spatial skills and even creativity. More and more of the world’s population is bilingual or multilingual rather than monolingual and we at Huntingdale have been promoting the benefits of being bilingual or multilingual to our families  and further afield since 1997.

Huntingdale Primary School Website