PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 21
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
2.3
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Some activities that work
The plurilingual approach to language education is not a new method that teachers should follow slavishly. Rather, it
is a general approach to teaching, learning and classroom communication that is shaped by the four principles
summarized at the beginning of section 2.1. By emphasizing dialogic and exploratory classroom talk and encouraging
pupils to take initiatives, the approach fosters reflective learning. It is never too early to make pupils aware of what
they are learning and why. Even in the Infant classes it’s possible to stimulate reflection on learning, its processes and
outcomes by regularly asking five questions: What are we doing? Why? How? With what results? What next? In senior
classes, some teachers have used the WALT (“We are learning to …”) and WILF (“What I’m looking for …”) technique to
develop their pupils’ reflective skills. At all levels of the school, learning that pupils undertake on their own initiative
should always be encouraged and applauded. It is natural that they learn fragments of one another’s home languages;
they may also teach one another the same song in all the languages of the classroom, or songs from the countries
their parents came from.
As we explained in section 1.4, a plurilingual approach to the learning of Irish means providing pupils with three kinds
of support: (i) especially in the early stages, interactive routines whose structure and meaning are already familiar to
them in English; (ii) the regular use of Irish in the delivery and processing of curriculum content; and (iii) the transfer
of developing literacy skills from English to Irish via the production of parallel texts in the two languages. A pedagogical
dynamic based on these three kinds of support also accommodates EAL pupils’ home languages and fosters the
development of home language literacy. The dynamic of linguistic interdependence supports the gradual
development of academic language across the individual pupil’s plurilingual repertoire. The next three sub-sections
provide examples of activities for each of these support types, and a fourth sub-section briefly describes four ways of
consolidating plurilingual learning. All the activities we describe were devised and successfully implemented by
teachers in Scoil Bhríde (Cailíní), Blanchardstown.
2.3.1 Using familiar routines and themes to support language learning in junior classes
Greetings
One of the earliest and most natural ways of introducing Irish into an English-medium school is by teaching pupils
how to greet one another in Irish using the salutation Dia dhuit. This can be extended to all the languages of the
classroom by asking if anyone knows a different way of saying Hello. The question can be put in context for very young
children by asking them to think about what their parents say when they come to collect them from school. Very soon
pupils learn that while one child says Dobri den, another says Salut, a third says Ciao, and so on. Pupils are encouraged
to tell their parents the different ways in which classmates greet one another. In this way all pupils’ languages are
acknowledged and children are exposed to a new and important fact: that there are many different ways of performing
simple communicative acts. To begin with, some EAL pupils may feel self-conscious when encouraged to speak their
home language or volunteer information about it. Needless to say, their reticence should be handled sensitively.
Counting and addition
Pupils in Junior Infants are expected to be able to count in sequence from 1 to 10 in the language of schooling. They
are also expected to be able to identify the various numerals involved and put them in the correct order. Some pupils
will already know how to do this while others will not. In an English-medium school, counting will first be taught in
Delivering
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