PPLI Primary Guidelines REVISED EDITION - Flipbook - Page 50
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
2.5 Consolidating plurilingual learning
When a plurilingual approach is implemented at all stages of the curriculum, teachers will think of many different ways
of consolidating language learning across the school. Here are just four examples.
Inter-class interaction
EAL pupils from senior classes (Third–Sixth) can visit junior classes and interact with pupils in Irish and their HLs. Senior
pupils can also teach juniors songs in their HL. These activities benefit senior pupils as well as juniors because they
acknowledge and affirm their linguistic identity and promote self-esteem.
Senior pupils read stories to juniors
In Fifth and Sixth Class pupils may regard fairy tales as suitable for much younger children. However, having pupils at
this level read Irish versions of stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” to Junior
and Senior Infants is a good way of boosting the language skills of all involved. Similarly, EAL pupils in Fifth and Sixth
Class can read stories in their HL to Junior and Senior Infants who have the same HL; and they can repeat the exercise
for their classmates, who try to identify and understand key words and phrases.
“Dormi Jesu”
A teacher of Sixth Class told her pupils that she was learning a Latin carol in her local choir. She was interested to know
if they would be able to decipher its meaning. Knowing that carols are associated with Christmas, a Romanian pupil
suggested that the sound of Crăciun, in her language, was like Christian, and Christmas is a Christian festival. Another
pupil said that the French Noël reminded her of Nollaig in Irish. The teacher then told the pupils the name of the carol,
“Dormi Jesu”, displayed the text on the whiteboard (Figure 40) and asked them to listen carefully to the words as she
read them. What followed was a stimulating interaction in which the children used their combined plurilingual
expertise to work out the meaning of the words.
Autonomous language learning
One way of encouraging autonomous learning
is to introduce a Language Box to which pupils
voluntarily contribute texts of various kinds:
favourite recipes written in various languages,
free writing in languages of their choice,
personal profiles, etc. This provides an
opportunity for pupils to write in languages
they know while providing support for pupils
who are learning a language already spoken by
one or more of their classmates.
Figure 40: “Dormi Jesu”: snapshot of whiteboard as pupils decipher the meaning of the
Lain carol
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