PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 8
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
ppli.ie
1.1 The plurilingual approach to language education and the Primary Language Curriculum
The Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) advocates a “plurilingual
approach” to language education. The CEFR distinguishes between plurilingual individuals, who are able to
communicate in two or more languages, and multilingual societies, in which two or more languages are present. This
distinction accommodates two facts: plurilingual individuals do not necessarily live in multilingual communities, and
multilingual communities are not necessarily made up of plurilingual individuals. The CEFR also distinguishes between
multilingual and plurilingual approaches to language education. A multilingual approach provides for the teaching
of second and foreign languages in isolation from one another, “with the ‘ideal native speaker’ as the ultimate model”,
whereas a plurilingual approach seeks to develop “a communicative competence to which all knowledge and
experience of language contributes and in which languages interrelate and interact”. If this latter approach is to become
a reality, each language taught at school must be a fully integrated part of each pupil’s communicative experience
from the very beginning. As the CEFR acknowledges, the adoption of a plurilingual approach entails a significant
modification of the aim of language education, which is now “to develop a linguistic repertory in which all linguistic
abilities have a place”. This is the goal of the new Primary Language Curriculum, which provides for an integrated
approach to the teaching of English and Irish while taking account of immigrant pupils’ home languages. An integrated
approach to language education is recommended by the research report that Pádraig Ó Duibhir and Jim Cummins
wrote for the NCCA in 2012.
The pedagogical implications of the plurilingual approach can be summarized in four principles, to which we shall
return from time to time in the following sections:
1. Teaching and learning should be grounded in language use that is spontaneous and authentic: spontaneous in
the sense that it arises naturally from the minute-to-minute activities of the classroom; authentic in the sense that
it reflects the concerns of the learners both in the immediate context of learning and in their lives more generally.
An integrated plurilingual repertoire helps to shape and define the individual’s identity, so teaching and learning
should also be organized in ways that engage learners’ existing identities in the fullest possible way.
2. Teaching and learning should draw on all the linguistic resources available to learners: their proficiency in other
languages and their explicit and intuitive knowledge of linguistic structures and the pragmatic and sociolinguistic
conventions of language use.
3. Teaching and learning should acknowledge that languages are discrete. Although a plurilingual repertoire makes
it possible to switch between languages in order to facilitate communication, the CEFR describes proficiency in
relation to particular languages. In other words, it respects the fact – confirmed by a large body of psycholinguistic
research – that languages are separable in the mind and separate from one another in most contexts of use. The
goal of a plurilingual approach to language education should be to enable learners to achieve the highest possible
level of literate proficiency in each of the languages they are learning.
4. Plurilingual repertoires are necessarily provisional: at any time in life, a change in our circumstances may require us
to learn a new language; it may also mean that we have less reason to use one or more of the languages in our
repertoire. With this possibility in mind, teaching should help learners to develop language learning skills that they
can deploy in later life. These include skills of self-management and the ability to reflect on the process of language
learning and evaluate its outcomes. We return to the issue of self-management on p. 19 below.
Delivering
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