PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 11
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
ppli.ie
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 an English-medium 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 skills, acquiring the words and phrases that embody key curriculum concepts, and in due
course mastering the registers and genres characteristic of the different curriculum subjects. The task facing children
from families who do not speak English at home is altogether more challenging because they have not acquired their
action knowledge in a version of the language of schooling. There is thus no easy way of promoting a fruitful interaction
between school knowledge and their action knowledge.
It is often assumed, in Ireland as in other countries, that children from immigrant families will progress most rapidly if
they try to forget their home language and concentrate all their energies on mastering the language of schooling. This
leads some schools to forbid the use of home languages anywhere on their premises. Such a policy is cruel because, as
was pointed out in section 1.2, the language first acquired in early childhood is central to the pupil’s identity and it is
the medium in which his or her action knowledge has been acquired. To require pupils to shed their identity and action
knowledge as they come through the school gate is hardly to provide them with the secure and nurturing environment
that the Primary School Curriculum argues is necessary for effective learning. To forbid the use of home languages is
also foolish. The language that has shaped pupils’ identity and action knowledge is necessarily the default medium of
their discursive thinking and is thus their primary cognitive tool; instead of blocking it, we must find ways of helping
them to use it. Finally, the policy of forbidding the use of home languages in school is doomed to failure, because it is
impossible to suppress them in the never-ending but unspoken stream of pupils’ consciousness.
So, what is to be done? Recognizing that a truly inclusive school must find ways of exploiting all pupils’ action knowledge,
Scoil Bhríde (Cailíní) adopted the policy of encouraging pupils from immigrant families to use their home language for
whatever purposes seem to them appropriate, inside as well as outside the classroom. This prepares the way for
implementing the second of the pedagogical principles that underpin the plurilingual approach: Teaching and learning
should draw on all the linguistic resources available to learners (section 1.1 above). Junior Infants quickly discover which
of their peers speak their own or a closely related language, which helps them when working in pairs or small groups.
Learning to count and matching colours and shapes are treated as multilingual activities – they are carried out in English,
Irish and home languages. In this way, pupils’ home language proficiency contributes to their learning both of curriculum
content and of English as the principal language of instruction. This is what Languages Connect is getting at when it
argues that immigrant pupils’ proficiency in their home language contributes to the development of their proficiency
in English.
Teachers in Scoil Bhríde routinely ask pupils from immigrant families to tell the rest of the class how they express key
words and concepts in their home language, and from an early age they encourage pupils to make comparisons between
the various languages present in the class, including English and Irish. This helps all pupils to develop an unusually high
level of language awareness; it also encourages discussion of the why and how of language learning, in accordance with
the fourth of the principles that underpin the plurilingual approach (section 1.1 above). But perhaps most important,
Delivering
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