PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 9
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
2. Teaching and learning should draw on all the linguistic resources available to learners: an essential part of what
learners bring with them is their proficiency in other languages and their explicit and intuitive knowledge of
linguistic structures and the pragmatic and sociolinguistic conventions of language use. Dialogic and exploratory
talk enables learners to share their linguistic resources with the teacher and their fellow learners.
3. Teaching and learning should acknowledge that languages are discrete. Although a plurilingual repertoire makes
it possible to switch between languages and/or to mix them in order to facilitate communication, the CEFR
describes proficiency in relation to particular languages. In other words, it respects the fact – confirmed by a large
body of psycholinguistic research 12 – that languages are separable in the mind and separate from one another in
most contexts of use. The goal of a plurilingual approach to language education should be to enable learners to
achieve the highest possible level of literate proficiency in each of the languages they are learning.
4. Plurilingual repertoires are necessarily provisional: at any time in life, a change in our circumstances may require us
to learn a new language; it may also mean that we have less reason to use one or more of the languages in our
repertoire. With this possibility in mind, teaching should help learners to develop language learning skills that they
can deploy in later life. These include skills of self-management and the ability to reflect on the process of language
learning and evaluate its outcomes.
“
Children from
immigrant families who
Children’s acquisition of the language of the home in early childhood is closely bound
up with their cognitive development, primary socialization and enculturation. As they
learn to speak, they learn to think; by speaking they also assert membership of the
family into which they have been born; and family membership introduces them to the
routines, attitudes and beliefs that define family culture. From birth, normally endowed
speak a language other than
English or Irish at home bring
additional diversity that extends
“
1.2 Language development in the pre-school years
far beyond differences between
languages.
children are proactive in developing relationships and engaging with their immediate
environment; by nature, they are autonomous agents, eager to take initiatives both in
conversation and
in their exploration of the physical world. At the same time, of course, they depend on parents, siblings and other
caregivers to engage with them in the dialogue that gradually provides them with knowledge and the language with
which to talk about it.
When children from English-speaking families start school at
the age of four and a half, they have passed through closely
similar processes of linguistic, cognitive and social
development. But those processes have been fed by a
potentially infinite diversity of experience as a result of
differences in domestic routine, family structure and dynamic,
the stories they are familiar with, the television programmes
they watch, the apps they play with on their parents’
smartphones and tablets, the toys they have acquired, the
12
See, for example, D. Singleton, “A critical reaction from second language research”, in V. Cook & Li Wei (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic
Multi-competence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 502–520.
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