PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 47
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Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
Autonomous language learning
One way of encouraging autonomous learning is to introduce a Language Box to which pupils voluntarily contribute
texts of various kinds: favourite recipes written in various languages, free writing in languages of their choice, personal
profiles, etc. This provides an opportunity for pupils to write in languages they know while providing support for pupils
who are learning a language already spoken by one or more of their classmates.
In addition:
•
Pupils from a variety of language backgrounds may choose to learn the home language of a friend (often a
reciprocal arrangement).
•
Individual pupils use a variety of methods to teach themselves new languages – CDs, course books, language
quizzes, language videos, keeping language notebooks, etc.
•
Two or more pupils form a language learning partnership.
Encouraging pupils to improve their home language prociency
When grandparents or other family members phone or pupils visit their parents’ country of origin, they may realize
that they cannot converse as easily as they would like in their home language. This is quite normal: growing up in an
English-speaking environment will influence children’s home language development to varying degrees. They should
be praised for what they can do and given every encouragement to continue to use and learn their home language,
perhaps by practising it with other speakers of the language during break. Plurilingual development is not a matter of
instantly achieving “native speaker” proficiency in the language of the home but of gradually acquiring a linguistic
repertoire of which the home language is a fully integrated part.
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