PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 15
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
The classroom activities presented in Part II of these guidelines embody three general principles:
1. When English is the language of instruction, Irish is the second and the MFL is the third language of the curriculum,
teachers should use Irish and the MFL for interactive routines with which pupils are already familiar in English,
especially in the early stages. Obvious examples in Junior Infants are learning to count and learning to match shapes
and colours (already referred to in section 1.3). Action games can also be played multilingually, and stories with
which pupils are already familiar in English can be read to them in Irish or the MFL. In this way, pupils’ proficiency
in English scaffolds the development of their proficiency in Irish and the MFL.
2. In the presentation of curriculum content, teachers should as a matter of course give pupils the Irish and, in stages
3 and 4, the MFL equivalent for key words and concepts. As pupils’ proficiency grows, it should be possible for Irish
to replace English for parts of each lesson in a version of CLIL (content and language integrated learning). It goes
without saying that the use of pupils’ plurilingual repertoires should be encouraged in all lessons; also that teachers
should sometimes use the MFL as well as Irish when communicating informally with pupils outside the classroom.
3. The production of parallel texts of the kind described in section 1.3 should play a central role in the development
of pupils’ writing skills. It is not necessary for texts always to be produced first in English. If the teacher and pupils
collaborate in writing a story in Irish or the MFL during class, pupils should find it easy enough to translate the story
into English for homework; translating a comparable text from English into Irish or the MFL, on the other hand,
might well be beyond them.
Whether they come from Irish or immigrant families, pupils at
Scoil Bhríde encountered Irish for the first time when they
started school. Junior Infants teachers reported that HLs
tended to be used when the focus switched from English to
Irish: the second language of the curriculum evidently licensed
multilingual communication. This had two important
consequences. Irish pupils were strongly motivated to learn
Irish because they too wanted a home language and pupils
from immigrant families were no less keen to learn Irish than
their native-born peers, which in turn motivated some Irish
pupils to learn another language with help from a family
member or on their own.
Whether English and Irish are the only two languages in play
or they are supplemented by a variety of home languages, the
plurilingual approach lends itself to intercultural education;
indeed, the Council of Europe binds plurilingualism and
interculturality together in a single concept: plurilingual and
intercultural education. This prompts the question: how exactly
does the development of plurilingual repertoires lead to
intercultural learning?
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