PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 12
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
skills, acquiring the words and phrases that embody key curriculum concepts, and in due course mastering the registers
and genres characteristic of the different curriculum subjects. The task facing children from families who do not speak
English at home is altogether more challenging because they have not acquired their action knowledge in a version of
the language of schooling. There is thus no easy way of promoting a fruitful interaction between school knowledge and
their action knowledge.
It is often assumed, in Ireland as in other countries, that children from immigrant families will progress most rapidly if
they try to forget their HL and concentrate all their energies on mastering the language of schooling. This leads some
schools to forbid the use of HLs anywhere on their premises. Such a policy is cruel because, as was pointed out in section
1.2, the language first acquired in early childhood is the medium through which the pupil’s action knowledge has been
acquired and is thus central to his or her identity. To require pupils to shed their action knowledge and identity as they
come through the school gate is hardly to provide them with the secure and nurturing environment that the Primary
School Curriculum argues is necessary for effective learning. To forbid the use of HLs is also foolish. The language that
has shaped pupils’ action knowledge and identity is necessarily the default medium of their discursive thinking and is
thus their primary cognitive tool; instead of blocking it, we must find ways of helping them to use it. Finally, the policy
of forbidding the use of HLs in school is doomed to failure, because it is impossible to suppress them in the never-ending
but unspoken stream of pupils’ consciousness.
So, what is to be done? Recognizing that a truly inclusive school must find ways of exploiting all pupils’ action knowledge,
Scoil Bhríde (Cailíní) adopted the policy of encouraging pupils from immigrant families to use their HL for whatever
purposes seemed to them appropriate, inside as well as outside the classroom. This made it possible to implement the
second of the pedagogical principles that underpin the plurilingual approach: Teaching and learning should draw on
all the linguistic resources available to learners (section 1.1 above). Junior Infants quickly discovered which of their peers
spoke their own or a closely related language, which helped them when working in pairs or small groups. Learning to
count and matching colours and shapes were treated as multilingual activities – they were carried out in English, Irish
and HLs. In this way, pupils’ HL proficiency contributed to their learning both of curriculum content and of English as
the principal language of instruction. This is what Languages Connect is getting at when it argues that immigrant pupils’
proficiency in their HL contributes to the development of their proficiency in English.18
Teachers in Scoil Bhríde routinely asked pupils from immigrant families to tell the rest of the class the equivalent of key
words and concepts in their HL, and from an early age they encouraged pupils to make comparisons between the various
languages present in the class, including English and Irish. This helped all pupils to develop an unusually high level of
language awareness; it also encouraged discussion of the why and how of language learning, in accordance with the
fourth of the principles that underpin the plurilingual approach (section 1.1 above). But perhaps most important, pupils
from immigrant families became literate in their HL by transferring the skills they were developing in English and Irish.
In this they received help from their parents, older siblings and other family members, and in some cases from weekend
classes organized by their community. But there is ample evidence to suggest that the high levels of motivation
18
Languages Connect, p. 30.
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