PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 10
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
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1.3 The linguistic demands of primary schooling
The 1999 Primary School Curriculum assumes that new knowledge is successfully
acquired only on the basis of what the learner already knows:“the child’s existing
knowledge and experience form the base for learning”. The knowledge that
pupils bring with them to primary school has been called their “action
knowledge” because it is the “inner map of reality” on which their actions are
based. The pedagogical challenge is to present and process “school knowledge”
(curriculum content) in ways that are accessible to pupils from the perspective
of their action knowledge; and the pedagogical goal is to help them to absorb
school knowledge into an ever-expanding and increasingly sophisticated store
of action knowledge. It is generally agreed that the most reliable means of
achieving this goal is classroom communication that allows pupils to take
initiatives and encourages them to think aloud – communication, in other words,
that is dialogic and exploratory. This coincides with the first of the pedagogical
principles that underpin the plurilingual approach (section 1.1 above). As the Primary School Curriculum further notes,
“language is central to the learning process” and “the child is an active agent in his or her learning”. One of the curriculum’s
general aims is “to enable children to learn how to learn”, and this is achieved by engaging them in problem-solving
that requires them to “observe, collate and evaluate evidence, to ask relevant questions, to identify essential information,
to recognize the essence of a problem, to suggest solutions, and to make informed judgements” (cf. the fourth of the
pedagogical principles summarized in section 1.1).
The process of teaching and learning at primary school is many times more complex than a brief summary can easily
convey, and it is made more complex still by the need to develop pupils’ literacy skills. To begin with, this is a matter of
teaching them how to represent the spoken word in writing, but from a relatively early stage learning to read and write
also means learning to communicate in ways that differ significantly from the oral communication that has shaped
pupils’ 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
home language; it develops with the acquisition of school knowledge.
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
Delivering
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