A Plurilingual Approach to Language Education at Primary Level: An Example from Ireland

The Council of Europe advocates a plurilingual approach to language education, the goal being to develop “a communicative competence to which all knowledge and experience of language contributes and in which languages interrelate and interact” (Council of Europe, Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (p. 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). This chapter describes and interprets the version of such an approach developed by an Irish primary school with a linguistically diverse pupil cohort. The essence of the approach is to encourage pupils from immigrant families to use their home languages inside as well as outside the classroom and to foster the transfer to those languages of the literacy skills pupils develop in English and Irish. The chapter begins by briefly introducing the school, the language learning outcomes it achieves, and the Irish context. It then discusses in turn the school’s language policy; the ways in which home languages are drawn into classroom discourse; the inclusion of home languages in the Infant classes, where pupils also begin to learn Irish; the use of parallel texts in two or more languages to support the development of home language literacy; the integrated approach to the teaching of French in the last two primary grades; and pupils’ readiness to undertake ambitious language learning projects on their own initiative. The chapter draws on a corpus of qualitative data: reports and recordings of classroom interactions, examples of pupils’ written work, teachers’ work plans and monthly reports, and interviews with pupils.