Best Practice in Home Language Teaching

This event has already taken place. A video recording of the panel discussion can be found on this page.

Join us for this webinar as we discuss the importance of home language teaching. We will be sharing ideas about how to overcome some of the associated challenges we face as teachers, parents and students.

Get to Know our Panellists:

Camille Gautier

Camille Gautier graduated from the University of Southampton and has been teaching for 11 years. She started her career in a small comprehensive school in rural England before moving to Moscow to teach French in an IB school. She has been living in India for the past eight years and is the Head of Secondary and IBDP Coordinator at DSB International School. She is an experienced IB educator and a team-leader examiner for French B. In her spare time, Camille is a passionate marathon runner and enjoys learning languages.

Chandrika Mathur

Chandrika Mathur is a language teacher (French, Hindi, and English), a designer of materials used to teach new languages to children, and a teacher educator. She is currently a visiting faculty member at Azim Premji University. Her concerns revolve around awakening teachers’ sensitivity to children’s learning processes and raising consciousness about the centrality of language in the educational endeavour, whether in language classrooms or content-based classrooms such as science, mathematics or the social sciences and humanities.

While working at Rishi Valley School from 1992-2018, she had the opportunity to create, classroom test, and refine a set of teaching-learning materials to teach Hindi to non-Hindi-speaking children in school. These got published with Orient Blackswan in 2013 in the form of a textbook and workbook series titled Hindi Ki Duniya 1 to 5. She served as Joint Director of Rishi Valley Institute for Teacher Education from 2006 to 2018, developing outreach programmes as well as in-house orientation and mentoring of new teachers in Rishi Valley School.

From 1987-1990, she taught courses in French language and literature at the University of Ottawa and the Public Service Commission of the Government of Canada. She studied French language and literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She trained to teach French as a foreign language in Paris at the Sorbonne University and later completed her PhD in Film Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

J. Rafael Ángel

J. Rafael Ángel is the co-founder of Ampers& Consulting group, and has been involved in language and literature and additional language curriculum design and instruction since 2000. He started teaching in his native country, Mexico, and then expanded his international experience by teaching in the United States, Jordan, India, China, and the United Arab Emirates. He is an experienced IB educator and workshop leader. His involvement with the IB also includes his collaboration in the design and standardization of the teacher support materials for the IB Middle Years Program (MYP) Next Chapter and his role as part of the MYP Language Acquisition Curriculum Review team. He is a certified Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction (CBCI) independent trainer and consultant, and a Sheltered Language Support Trainer. He has authored Spanish books for IB MYP as well as the Spanish Ab Initio for IBDP of the By Concept Series published by Hodder Education. His articles on approaches to teaching and learning skills in virtual environments have been published in the International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning in 2013 and 2015. He holds a BA in Foreign Language Teaching and Learning from the University of Guadalajara and an MA in Education with a focus on Approaches to Teaching and Learning from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). Rafael also works alongside Dr Lynn Erickson, Dr Lois Lanning and Rachel French at the CBCI Institute as a World Language Specialist.

Nayantara Piramal

Nayantara Piramal is 17 years old and is currently in her first year in the IBDP at Ascend International School, where she has been learning Spanish for over 4 years. Her interests include reading and writing about social issues that she is passionate about, such as women's rights. She would like to immerse herself in these causes by volunteering at the Aangan Trust.