PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 27
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
curriculum learning. It also presents early opportunities to identify cross-linguistic similarities, e.g., a dó, deux, duo, and
trois, three, a trí. The same approach can be adopted when teaching addition. Teachers should not be surprised or
worried if pupils mix languages when they perform simple additions, e.g., a two agus a two sin a four. In time and with
practice, they will learn not to mix languages.
Colours
Discussion of colours in English can include words for colours in Irish, and EAL pupils can be invited to tell the class the
words for colours in their HLs (again they may have to ask their parents). One way of teaching basic colours is to arrange
mats of different colours in a circle and invite individual pupils to jump onto each mat in turn, calling out the word for
its colour in their preferred language. The rest of the class repeats what each pupil says. This is a good way to hone
pupils’ listening skills. From time to time, some languages may be more popular than others and children will mix
languages when reporting their favourite colour, e.g., corcra (Irish for purple) and rojo (Spanish for red) have been
reported as: “Corcra/rojo is my favourite colour”. Children know that the names of their favourite colours are purple
and red in English. When they like the sound of their favourite colour in another language, they will sometimes use
that word to identify their choice.
Days of the week
When pupils have learned the days of the week and their sequence in English, they can be taught their Irish equivalents.
After that, they can learn the days of the week in whatever HLs are present in the classroom (parents are usually happy
to write down the necessary words in their HL). Experience shows that children enjoy performing simple learning
activities multilingually; they find it motivating to learn the languages of their classmates at the same time as they
learn curriculum content in English and Irish. Regularly performing simple learning activities multilingually lays essential
foundations for the increasingly complex processes of plurilingual learning in later years. Even at this early stage it is
a good idea to support oral learning with print; for example, the days of the week should be written in each of the
languages of the classroom and displayed on the classroom wall (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Days of the week recorded in the languages of the classroom
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