PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 11
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
also means learning to communicate in ways that differ significantly from the oral communication that has shaped their
lives so far. Oral communication is context-dependent: the comprehension and production of meaning are supported
by paralinguistic cues (intonation, gesture, eye contact, feedback, etc.) and by features of the physical situation (persons
and objects in focus, the sunshine that is pleasantly warm or uncomfortably hot, the rain that is making you wet, etc.).
Communication of this kind is a precondition for child language acquisition and the so-called naturalistic acquisition of
second and foreign languages; children develop conversational language as they acquire their action knowledge.
Academic language, on the other hand, tends to be context-reduced: cues to meaning are provided entirely by the
spoken or written text we are seeking to understand or produce. No child has academic language as his or her HL; it
develops with the acquisition of school knowledge and literacy.
It is important to make four things clear regarding the distinction between conversational and academic language. First,
from a cognitive point of view the distinction is not absolute and boundaries are often blurred. For example, chat among
friends is cognitively undemanding, but if in the course of such chat you try to persuade others of your point of view,
the task may quickly become cognitively challenging. Conversely, classroom talk routinely includes passages of
conversational as well as academic language; only thus, after all, is it possible to bring pupils’ action knowledge into
fruitful engagement with school knowledge. Secondly, although academic language develops with the acquisition of
literacy, some writing tasks use conversational language (e.g., e-mail, text-messaging), while academic language includes
much of the spoken communication that occurs in classrooms and other academic contexts. Thirdly, academic language
occurs in all contexts of formal learning: children in kindergarten encounter it in a primitive form as soon as the focus
shifts from “here and now” to “there and then”. And fourthly, academic language is by no means confined to formal
educational environments; it also has value and validity in a multitude of contexts outside the classroom or lecture hall.
In other words, mastery of academic language is an overarching educational goal.
When children from English-speaking homes attend primary school in Ireland, the conversion of school knowledge into
action knowledge requires them gradually to extend their linguistic repertoire in their first language, adding literacy
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