Our Unit 1 English Language cohort recently embarked on an excursion to Healesville Sanctuary, in order to undertake fieldwork and gather data about animal communication.
In the classroom, our students learn about how human language differs to animal communication, due to the presence of six key qualities of language: arbitrariness, cultural transmission, creativity, displacement, spontaneity, and structure.
Students were tasked with observing various animal species and gathering data on which of these qualities they demonstrated evidence of, as well as gathering samples of language and communication in action. Students then unpacked this data in their SAC last week.
This excursion was the first of its kind for Healesville Sanctuary, who worked with us to create and research linguistics content that their zookeepers presented to our students.
Here are a range of comments and reflections from our students about the day.
- It was a great learning opportunity to develop our understanding of the concepts we learnt in class and to see them in real life. Being able to recognise and apply the properties that make human communication unique through seeing the animals interact with each other and with the zookeepers was really cool.
- One highlight was being able to get the experience of entering the enclosure of the Tawny Frogmouth.
- One of the highlights was the Spirits of the sky. It was really cool to see how well-trained all the birds are, as well as how it is done under their own consent. My group loved seeing the wallabies from really up-close and it was really surprising how calm and composed they were. I also loved seeing the mothers and babies together, it was really cute! Lastly, the wombats were really, really cute as we got to see a wombat be really confused and take 5 tries to get into its home to sleep!
- This Wednesday was an amazing and exceedingly unique excursion, i would have never thought of doing for English language. Although educational, the excursion proved to be a more fun and enjoyable way to learn the content. My group loved to observe the echidnas and observe their communication.
- We had an amazing experience having vibrant birds swoop over our heads. Some of the animals were free to roam and we really enjoyed watching them hop around. We were able to see some tawny frogmouths that were not open to the public which made us all very excited.
Mr Tristan Kent and Ms Sarah Smith