PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 46
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
Dormi Jesu
A teacher of Sixth Class told her pupils that she was learning a Latin carol in her local choir. She was interested to know
if they would be able to decipher its meaning. Knowing that carols are associated with Christmas, a Romanian pupil
suggested that the sound of Crciun, in her language, was like Christian, and Christmas is a Christian festival. Another
pupil pointed out that the French Noël reminded her of Nollaig in Irish. The teacher then told the pupils the name of
the carol ‘Dormi Jesu’ and putting the text on the whiteboard asked them to listen carefully to the words as she read
them. What followed was a stimulating interaction where the children used their combined plurilingual expertise to
work out the meaning of the words.
Dormi Jesu! Mater ridet
Quae tam dulcem somnum videt,
Dormi Jesu blandule!
Si non dormis, Mater plorat
Inter fila cantans orat
Blande, veni, somnule
Fintan O’Toole
26 November 2019 Schools with immigrants producing tomorrow’s Irish speakers
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-schools-with-immigrants-producing-tomorrow-s-irish-speakers1.4094368
Bubbling under the surface of Irish life is a great polyglot stew, a profusion of tongues unlike anything in our history.
And here’s the thing we need to grasp – this is a fabulous resource for indigenous culture. It is turning a monochrome
screen of words to a glorious technicolour.
And instead of creating the tower of Babel that is often feared, this policy simply made all the kids better at languages.
They became a great resource for each other, adding insights from their own linguistic worlds. Imagine a classroom in
which half a dozen children are retelling an Irish legend in half a dozen other languages, translating, inquiring, playing
with the infinite diversity of words. What a fabulous educational experience that must be – working-class kids getting
a daily course in applied linguistics that would be hard to match at university.
And one of the beneficiaries of this approach is, rather wonderfully, the Irish language. Kids who are comfortably
polylingual are much more at ease with Irish than those who live in a monolingual English world… “the presence of
other languages in the classroom helps them to accept Irish as one more medium of communication”.
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