On 3 Dec, staff from CLAIR Sydney visited Wellers Hill State School in Queensland. The school is widely known as one that puts a lot of efforts into Japanese language education in the state of Queensland, where Japanese language education is the most prominent in Australia. Wellers Hill State School is also the only Japanese language primary bilingual school in Queensland. The school implements an immersion program, which is a bilingual language education method where they teach students general subjects such as mathematics and science, in Japanese. The school has set times of the day so that both languages are used at designated times equally. For example, they speak in only Japanese in the first half of the day, and only in English in the second half. Wellers Hill State School started this program in January, 2014.
The first ever group of students who participated in the program will be in Year 6 this year, which will be their final year at the school. They can speak to teachers and amongst themselves in class in fluent Japanese. We hope they will become cultural bridges between Australia and Japan through various opportunities, including the JET Programme, in future.
