BOS 25/10

Eligibility criteria apply to the following courses:

• all Beginners Languages courses
• all Heritage Languages courses
• Continuers courses in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean.

The eligibility criteria for the Heritage Languages courses have been newly developed. The eligibility criteria for the Beginners Languages courses and the Continuers courses in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean have been reviewed and clarified.

Eligibility criteria for all Languages courses have been placed in a common framework that describes the course levels, target candidatures and the continuum of learning.

Students who wish to undertake a Beginners Language course, a Continuers course in Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian or Korean, or a Heritage Language course are required to complete the appropriate Languages Eligibility Declaration form (including a statutory declaration). Students are also required to provide documentary evidence, as appropriate, to support their declaration.

Schools are reminded that:

• to be eligible for a course, students are required to meet all of the eligibility criteria for a course at the time of course entry
• for the purpose of determining eligibility, speakers of dialects and variants of a language are considered to be speakers of the standard language
• ‘formal education’ is regarded as ‘education … that normally constitute(s) a continuous “ladder” of full-time education for children and young people’ (UNESCO International Standard Classification of Education, 1997).

Further materials to support schools in their application of the eligibility criteria, including new Languages Eligibility Declaration forms, will be available on the Board’s website early in Term 3, 2010.

Effective:

Preliminary Languages courses in 2011

Contact

Jenny Bryant
Senior Policy Officer
(02) 9367 8106
Email: jenny.bryant@bos.nsw.edu.au