PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 10
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
wider family and social networks their parents have introduced them to, the places they have been to on holiday …
the list is endless. This diversity of experience is reflected in the diversity of their interests, which in turn is reflected in
the diversity of the words they know. Pre-school children also differ in their communication skills, depending on the
frequency and style of conversation they have experienced inside and outside the home. As any Junior Infants teacher
knows only too well, this means that the pupils in any reception class are dizzyingly diverse linguistically, socially and
culturally, even if they all speak what counts as the same language at home.
Children from immigrant families who speak a language other than English or Irish at home bring additional diversity
that extends far beyond differences between languages. Some immigrant parents come from communities in Africa
and India where multilingualism is widespread and fluid; others come from countries that identify the nation state
with a national language. Some are in close contact with their country of origin and may return there regularly, while
others have lost contact, whether from choice or necessity. Some are members of immigrant communities that have
well-established networks of social support, while others have little or no contact with other speakers of their language.
And as with their Irish counterparts, the socio-economic diversity of immigrant families reflects great diversity of
educational background, experience and achievement.
1.3 The linguistic demands of primary schooling
The introduction to the Primary School Curriculum of 1999 assumes that new knowledge is successfully acquired only
on the basis of what the learner already knows: “the child’s existing knowledge and experience form the base for learning”. 13
The knowledge that pupils bring with them to primary school has been called their “action knowledge” because it is
the “inner map of reality” on which their actions are based.14 The pedagogical challenge is to present and process “school
knowledge” (curriculum content) in ways that are accessible to pupils from the perspective of their action knowledge;
and the pedagogical goal is to help them to absorb school knowledge into an ever-expanding and increasingly
sophisticated store of action knowledge. It is generally agreed that the most reliable means of achieving this goal is
classroom communication that allows pupils to take initiatives and encourages them to think aloud – communication,
in other words, that is dialogic and exploratory. This coincides with the first of the pedagogical principles that underpin
the plurilingual approach (section 1.1 above). As the Primary School Curriculum notes, “language is central to the learning
process” and “the child is an active agent in his or her learning”. 15 One of the curriculum’s general aims is “to enable children
to learn how to learn”, 16 and this is achieved by engaging them in problem-solving that requires them to “observe, collate
and evaluate evidence, to ask relevant questions, to identify essential information, to recognize the essence of a problem,
to suggest solutions, and to make informed judgements” (cf. the fourth of the pedagogical principles summarized in section
1.1). 17
The process of teaching and learning at primary school is many times more complex than a brief summary can easily
convey, and it is made more complex still by the need to develop pupils’ literacy skills. To begin with, this is a matter of
teaching them how to represent the spoken word in writing, but from a relatively early stage learning to read and write
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17
Primary School Curriculum, Introduction, Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1999, p. 8.
D. Barnes, From Communication to Curriculum, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, p. 80.
Primary School Curriculum, Introduction, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 7.
Ibid., p. 16.
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