Language & Culture

September 2008. World Language Class, Scarsdale Middle School. Collaborating teacher: Sandra Chan.

Sandra invited me to share with her French class students what it is like to live in Indonesia, which has more than 300 different cultures and more than 700 languages and dialects. Students learned how Indonesia chose its national language, which was taken from one of the minorities languages. I also taught several Indonesian basic words to the students, and they taught me a few words in French as well. The main focus was given to the fact that most Indonesian kids are bilingual (the national and ethnic languages), and many are multilingual because Indonesian people love learning languages other than their ethnic one.