The Minister for Education, Heritage and Arts, Premila Kumar met with the Senior Education Specialists for Languages and teachers from various schools in Suva to discuss the progress of Conversational and Contemporary Vosa VakaViti and Fiji Hindi in all primary schools.
Minister Kumar, while addressing the Curriculum Specialists and teachers highlighted the importance of reviewing the existing resource materials and the need to include words that are conversational in nature.
The Fiji Hindi Booklet contains a few words that are not conversational Fiji Hindi and to make it easier for primary school students to understand and learn a new language, it is important to include words that are used normally in a conversation. This will allow students to better identify and recognise words when they listen to a conversation.
The teachers and curriculum specialists have been tasked to review all conversational language resource materials, discuss and recommend changes needed to make Conversational and Contemporary iTaukei and Fiji Hindi languages more interesting and practical for students to understand.
Minister Kumar, said “As teachers you need to introduce innovative learning options for students that will encourage participation in Conversational and Contemporary iTaukei and Fiji Hindi languages. Activities such as oratory, role pay, dialogue and many more that encourage the flow of conversations should form part of the lesson plans”.
It is important that as Fijians we appreciate the diverse society we live in and learning these two languages will not only help us understand each other better, but it will also allow us to better appreciate each other’s culture and heritage.
Minister Kumar encourages students to actively learn and take advantage of such initiatives as these opportunities were not available a few years ago.
All primary schools nationwide in the next school year will offer Conversational and Contemporary iTaukei and Fiji Hindi languages as a subject.