ppli.ieLanguage and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwancurriculum learning. It also presents early opportunities to identify cross-linguistic similarities, e.g., a dó, deux, duo, andtrois, three, a trí. The same approach can be adopted when teaching addition. Teachers should not be surprised orworried if pupils mix languages when they perform simple additions, e.g., a two agus a two sin a four. In time and withpractice, they will learn not to mix languages.ColoursDiscussion of colours in English can include words for colours in Irish, and EAL pupils can be invited to tell the class thewords for colours in their HLs (again they may have to ask their parents). One way of teaching basic colours is to arrangemats of different colours in a circle and invite individual pupils to jump onto each mat in turn, calling out the word forits colour in their preferred language. The rest of the class repeats what each pupil says. This is a good way to honepupils’ listening skills. From time to time, some languages may be more popular than others and children will mixlanguages when reporting their favourite colour, e.g., corcra (Irish for purple) and rojo (Spanish for red) have beenreported as: “Corcra/rojo is my favourite colour”. Children know that the names of their favourite colours are purpleand red in English. When they like the sound of their favourite colour in another language, they will sometimes usethat word to identify their choice.Days of the weekWhen 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 happyto write down the necessary words in their HL). Experience shows that children enjoy performing simple learningactivities multilingually; they find it motivating to learn the languages of their classmates at the same time as theylearn curriculum content in English and Irish. Regularly performing simple learning activities multilingually lays essentialfoundations for the increasingly complex processes of plurilingual learning in later years. Even at this early stage it isa good idea to support oral learning with print; for example, the days of the week should be written in each of thelanguages of the classroom and displayed on the classroom wall (Figure 2).Figure 2: Days of the week recorded in the languages of the classroomPPLI deliveringSupported by27
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