An insight to DaF Fö: Language preparation for an excursion to the Archibald exhibition at the AGNSW

Students in year 7 and 8 who are learning German as an additional language (DaF) take an additional 4 periods a week of DaF Fö (German support). In these periods, we focus on helping students with
the language content in the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) subjects taught in German: Art, Sport and Music.

To give an example:

This term, the art teachers of year 7 planned an excursion to the Archibald Exhibition. Therefore,
one of the things we did in DaF Fö, was to prepare the students so that they could participate in
the excursion using German according to their language proficiency level.

We started with learning basic vocabulary to describe a portrait and express our opinions about
the image. We then moved on to learning different phrases that could be useful when visiting an art gallery, e.g. „Wer ist der/die Künstler(in)?“, „Ist das das Original?“, „Wann wurde das Bild gemalt?” or „Wo sind die Toiletten?”.

Furthermore, the art teachers had prepared questions for the students to answer while at the exhibition. These questions were in German and in preparation for the excursion, in DaF Fö, we looked at different reading comprehension strategies that enabled the students to make qualified guesses
to the meaning of the questions. Sharing their ideas in the classroom, the students could decipher
the questions.

To test what we had learned, we had a little art exhibition in the DaF room speaking only German.

Daf fö