PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 18
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
2.1
ppli.ie
Some pedagogical preliminaries
These guidelines address two educational challenges, to make Irish part of each pupil’s “everyday lived language” (the
Primary Language Curriculum) and to support the languages of the new Irish to the benefit of themselves and Irish
society (Languages Connect). As we explained in Part I, taken together these two challenges imply the adoption of a
“plurilingual” approach to language education, which is shaped by four pedagogical principles:
1. The teaching and learning of languages should be grounded in spontaneous and authentic language use:
languages are “lived” only when they are used for communicative and reflective purposes.
2. Teaching and learning should draw on all the linguistic resources available to learners.
3. Teaching and learning should acknowledge that languages are discrete entities.
4. Teaching should help pupils to develop awareness of language and of what language learning entails, e.g. by
drawing on their plurilingual repertoires to make connections between different languages.
The first of these four principles requires that Irish as well as English should be fully integrated in everyday classroom
communication; the second acknowledges that the home language of each pupil is his or her primary cognitive tool
and a valuable resource for the class as a whole; the third principle reminds us that the goal of all language education
should be to develop the highest possible level of age-appropriate literate proficiency in the languages in each pupil’s
repertoire; and the fourth reminds us of the importance of developing pupils’ reflective and metacognitive skills.
Current theories of second language acquisition differ in their understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that
produce proficiency, but they agree that those mechanisms are driven by spontaneous and authentic language use.
They agree, in other words, that it is impossible to teach languages in the traditional sense; the best we can do is create
the conditions that enable pupils to learn their target language by attempting to use it. So our first priority must always
be to involve pupils in genuine communication. This means providing them with the words and phrases that enable
them to participate, supporting their efforts to speak (and in due course write), and ensuring that classroom talk is
dialogic and exploratory (cf. section 1.3), so that it encourages them to take initiatives. The more initiatives pupils take,
the more likely it is that teachers will be diverted from their lesson plans. This is not something to worry about, however:
if language proficiency arises from language use, all pupil-initiated discourse will lead to learning. Its effect may not
be immediately apparent, but it will inevitably play its part in the hidden processes of language growth.
In order to meet the challenges of the Primary Language Curriculum and Languages Connect, we need to find ways
of scaffolding pupils’ attempts to use Irish (and English in the case of EAL pupils). We also need to include home
languages in classroom communication and in due course support pupils’ literacy development in those languages.
Teachers who are new to this approach may worry that because they do not know EAL pupils’ home languages, they
cannot understand when they speak and write them and thus cannot provide correction. This fear is, however,
misplaced. When, with help from their parents and other family members, EAL pupils transfer their emerging literacy
skills from English and Irish to their home language, they produce texts which native speakers of the languages in
question judge to be no less correct than texts written by their peers in the country they or their parents came from.
Delivering
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