LC Language Adventures 2024 (A5) - Flipbook - Page 10
Language Adventures: Embracing Languages and Cultures in Primary School
Section 2
Classroom practice
2.1 Reflection
To reflect on your own class context, you might find it useful to consider the
prompts below…
• Think about the learning strategies you have used in your own language
learning journey and how they help you or have previously helped you to learn.
• What kind of learning strategies do your pupils suggest work for them?
• How do these activities develop overall literacy and language learning skills?
• In what ways can you link languages to each other and to other curricular
areas when you are teaching?
• Can you see links with activities and practices which are already part of your
teaching?
2.2 Rationale and supporting pedagogies
What children can do in the languages they speak and how they have learned
can transfer from one language to another. Thus, developing awareness of the
knowledge, strategies and skills mastered in one or more languages, can greatly
assist the understanding of new languages and enhance learning processes.
Every opportunity must be taken to encourage pupils to use prior knowledge
and competencies acquired in languages they are taught or already know, in
order to highlight points of convergence, help them to understand how
languages work, and to develop their plurilingual repertoires in optimal ways.
Developing language awareness does not simply introduce pupils to the world
of linguistic diversity in their classrooms and beyond, but rather, it serves as a
support to language learning throughout pupils’ school lives, supporting their
literacy development. At the same time, when pupils explore this and reflect on
aspects that support their language learning, they not only become conscious
of strategies that can be used to make sense of new words and texts but they
also develop the confidence to make an attempt or take a risk, thus becoming
more active and autonomous learners.
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