PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 25
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
ppli.ie
• Clothes and weather: the teacher elicits from the class a list of the clothes worn in different countries and in different
seasons, using English, Irish and all the languages of the classroom.
• On any topic the teacher can ask questions in Irish that pupils answer in English and/or their home language.
Answers given in home languages are translated into English for the benefit of classmates.
• Discussion of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child leads pupils to consider how they could make
newcomers feel welcome in their class. This prompts them to make a multilingual poster to advertise the school’s
language policy and show newcomers that all languages are “at home” in their classroom.
• A lesson on clothes draws on all languages present in the class. Pupils compile a multilingual list of items of clothing
and footwear, looking for similarities and differences in pronunciation and spelling. Cultural differences are also
explored. The results of this work are captured on posters that can be used as a point of reference in future work.
• In a lesson on food, pupils discuss the ingredients required for making a particular dish, e.g. pasta, before making
the dish and tasting it. Pupils then make a multilingual table listing the ingredients and summarizing the steps in
cooking the dish in English, Irish and all the home languages present in the class.
Language awareness
The inclusion of Irish and home languages in classroom communication inevitably develops pupils’ language
awareness. It is a good idea to consolidate what they learn incidentally by regularly spending a few minutes focusing
on language as such. Pupils can compare the position of verbs and adjectives in English, Irish and the other languages
available to the class; they can explore the relation between orthography and pronunciation and the impact of diacritics
on pronunciation and meaning; and they can consider whether two or more of the languages present in the class are
closely related to one another. When they are, speakers of those languages can create a role play by way of illustration.
Senior pupils can carry out a survey of their classmates to discover, for example, in which languages present in the
class the adjective comes before the noun and in which languages it comes after.
It is a good idea to have regular discussions about language learning. Which languages in their developing plurilingual
repertoire do pupils find easiest to understand, speak, read and write? What helps them to learn a language – to
understand what people say to them, to speak, to read and to write? Present senior pupils with a short newspaper
report in a language they don’t know but on a topic they are already familiar with, e.g. a sporting event. Read the report
aloud and write key words and phrases on the whiteboard. Discovering that they can work out the meaning of these
words and phrases and thus understand the general gist of the report provides a boost to pupils’ confidence in their
linguistic ability; it also invites further discussion of what is involved in learning a new language.
Teachers whose class includes EAL pupils cannot be expected to know all the home languages present in the classroom.
But by encouraging the use of those languages they provide themselves with daily opportunities to learn, and by
presenting themselves as learners they create possibilities for co-learning that can be inspirational for pupils’ education.
Delivering
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