PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 25
ppli.ie
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
Developing awareness of language and language learning
When teachers ensure that Irish, EAL pupils’ HLs and (in stages 3 and 4) a MFL are routinely included in the dialogic
and exploratory talk of the classroom, awareness of language and language learning inevitably follows. As they begin
to understand what language is and how it works, pupils’ existing implicit knowledge gradually becomes explicit: they
are able to verbalize it and share it with others. Experience shows that they soon begin spontaneously to compare and
contrast the languages they know and the languages they are learning, drawing their own inferences from the sounds
of words, how they are written and how they are used. The knowledge they acquire in this way provides an important
support for their further language learning and literacy development. As we have already noted, the key role that HLs
play in this process encourages EAL pupils’ autonomous participation in classroom communication.
It is a good idea to consolidate what pupils learn incidentally by regularly spending a few minutes focusing explicitly
on language and language learning. For example, pupils can compare the position of verbs and adjectives in English,
Irish and the other languages available to the class; they can explore the relation between orthography and
pronunciation and the impact of diacritics on pronunciation and meaning; and they can consider whether two or more
of the languages present in the class are closely related to one another. Similarly, they can discuss which languages in
their developing plurilingual repertoire they find easiest to understand, speak, read and write; what helps them to
learn a language – to understand what people say to them, to speak, to read and to write. All of these activities can
arise from and feed into pupils’ plurilingual copybooks.
Developing plurilingual literacy
The development of fully integrated plurilingual repertoires entails that learners develop literacy skills in each of their
languages. It is widely assumed that this means teaching them to read and write in each language separately, which
is impossible when multiple HLs are present in the class. However, as we explained in section 1.3, it is possible for skills
in one language to be transferred to another language provided there is adequate exposure to that language and
sufficient motivation on the learner’s part. With help from their parents and older brothers and sisters, EAL pupils can
transfer their emerging literacy skills in English and Irish to their HLs. They learn to do this by producing parallel texts
in English, Irish, their HL and in due course the MFL – parallel in the sense that the texts are identical in structure and
content. This is a foundational activity in the plurilingual approach we are advocating in these guidelines.
2.4
Plurilingual learning in stages 1–4 of the primary curriculum
The activities we describe in this section are not merely aspirational: they have all been used successfully in Scoil Bhríde
(Cailíní), Blanchardstown, of which Déirdre Kirwan was principal for almost thirty years. The many examples of pupils’
plurilingual work are from the same source.
PPLI delivering
Supported by
25
