PPLI Primary Guidelines - Flipbook - Page 9
Language and Languages in the Primary School Some guidelines for teachers by David Little and Déirdre Kirwan
ppli.ie
1.2 Language development in the pre-school years
Children’s acquisition of the language of the home in early childhood is closely bound up with their cognitive
development, primary socialization and enculturation. As they learn to speak, they learn to think; by speaking they
also assert membership of the family into which they have been born; and family membership introduces them to the
routines, attitudes and beliefs that define family culture. From birth, typically developing children are proactive in
developing relationships and engaging with their immediate environment; by nature, they are autonomous agents,
eager to take initiatives both in conversation and in their exploration of the physical world. At the same time, of course,
they depend on parents, siblings and other caregivers to engage with them in the dialogue that gradually provides
them with knowledge and the language with which to talk about it.
When children from English-speaking families start school at the age of four and a half, they have passed through
closely similar processes of linguistic, cognitive and social development. But those processes have been fed by a
potentially infinite diversity of experience as a result of differences in domestic routine, family structure and dynamic,
the stories they are familiar with, the television programmes they watch, the apps they play with on their parents’
phones, the toys they have acquired, the wider family and social networks their parents have introduced them to, the
places they have been to on holiday … the list is endless. This diversity of experience is reflected in the diversity of
their interests, which in turn is reflected in the diversity of the words they know. Pre-school children also differ in their
communication skills, depending on the frequency and style of conversation they have experienced inside and outside
the home. As any Junior Infants teacher knows only too well, this means that when they start school pupils are
dizzyingly diverse linguistically, socially and culturally, even if they all speak what counts as the same language at home.
Children from immigrant families who speak a language other than English or Irish at home bring additional diversity
that extends far beyond differences between languages. Some immigrant parents come from communities in Africa
and India where multilingualism is widespread and fluid; others come from countries that identify the nation state
with a national language. Some are in close contact with their country of origin and may return there regularly, while
others have lost contact, whether from choice or necessity. Some are members of immigrant communities that have
well-established networks of social support, while others have little or no contact with other speakers of their language.
And as with their Irish counterparts, the socio-economic diversity of immigrant families reflects great diversity of
educational background, experience and achievement.
Delivering
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