Mrs Gail Spence, of Napier, ONZM for services to language education
Gail Spence has held voluntary executive roles with the New Zealand Association of Language Teachers (NZALT) since the 1980s, including time as President. She is currently Project Leader of the 50-year history of NZALT. She contributed to NZALT’s journal ‘The New Zealand Language Teacher’ and has presented papers at national and international language conferences. As the Ministry of Education’s inaugural Curriculum Facilitator: Languages, she oversaw languages added as a new learning area in the New Zealand Curriculum and commissioned pedagogical research into this new learning area. She wrote ‘Learning Languages: A Guide for New Zealand Schools’. Mrs Spence worked with NZQA, publishing companies and education providers on more than 60 contracts to support Learning Languages for international languages, te reo Māori and Pacific languages.