The core competences for OA2 teaching practice are: pedagogical competence and interaction and diversity-related competence.The aim of Step 6 of the Language Aware pathway is to incorporate language awareness as an assumed aspect of good pedagogical practice. The earlier steps in the pathway have looked at different ways language is present in education and how teachers use language. Step 6 focuses on the language/s of students and involves several parts:

- observations at the beginning of teaching practice 2
- actively including language awareness in teaching practice lesson plans and activities

An important point to keep in mind is that language is both individual and shared. Each individual uses language in slightly different ways, has somewhat different strengths and challenges, has different experiences with language and therefore each individual has their own 'language repertoire'. A language repertoire can include different languages and is the particular way an individual uses language/s. When teachers recognise the language repertoires of students it is easier to design tasks that students can participate in and to also include tasks and activities that can build on and expand the existing repertoires of students. When a teacher includes different kinds of reading activities, for example, this can benefit many students in different ways. For some students it might be a good reminder of how to strategically read a text in a textbook. For other students it might be the first time they have seen how the illustrations complement the content or how the subtitles summarise the main idea. If a teacher asks students to identify key concepts in a text placing them in a table, some students might include the formal term, a picture and the equivalent term in another language as well. This same task creates a space for students to use and expand their existing language repertoires.


The tasks in Step 6:

Orientation:
- watch the short video - the lesson from a pea
why are observation lessons before starting teach important for teachers? What different reasons can you come up with?

At the start of Teaching Practice 2 (autumn):
- during the initial observations of the class you will be teaching in teaching practice 2 use the observation sheet (the sketch of a student) and the guiding questions to map the language repertoires of (at least) two different students. Carefully observe how these two children are working in different lessons. This task should help you to prepare your own teaching during the teaching practice and help you to start to pay attention to language as part of your teacher repertoire.

Preparing for Teaching Practice 2 (spring):
- as you prepare lessons for the second part of teaching practice 2, deliberately include a session that encourages students to use more than one language as they study. For example, the students could record all the different languages they encounter in their day-to-day life - e.g. taking photographs of food packages, signs, noting down conversations, finding out about the multilingual repertoires of famous sports people or artists. Use this session as a community-building activity - not all students will be familiar with all the languages, but still these languages belong to our community. Think of creative ways for students to share their different language repertoires with one another, e.g. with language portraits that can be put on the wall or into a 'our class' book. For you as a teacher this task should provide insights into what languages are familiar to students and in what ways they are familiar - from family life, watching television... Remember to include tasks that encourage students to use their whole language repertoire to support their studying.