At St. Mary’s Primary School, most of our children speak English as an additional language and we understand the enormous benefits these languages bring to children’s understanding of themselves and the world. Alongside our teaching of English and Gaeilge, we use children’s home languages to create a challenging and motivating multilingual environment where every child is celebrated as an individual with their own set of experiences, skills and interests. In our school, we want our children to be proud of the languages they speak and to see how those languages are connected and how the skills learned in one language can be applied and used to build our understanding of another. This understanding encourages our children to see themselves as global citizens and builds their sense of cultural identity and intercultural awareness.
At St. Mary’s Primary School, all teachers are language teachers. We want to develop confident, curious, highly proficient and enthusiastic readers, writers, speakers and listeners. We want to teach language in meaningful contexts. We often take a thematic and enquiry-based approach, encouraging children to make connections, to explore and to investigate.
We want children in our school to see themselves represented in our school – in the books we read, the resources we use and the learning choices we make. We include children’s languages in our displays and have a wide range of books that celebrate diversity, including dual-language texts.
Linguistic diversity and developing language awareness
We nurture children’s home languages and encourage their use at school as we know that when children see their home language valued at school, they are more motivated to use it, feel proud of it and to see and make connections between their home language and the new languages they are learning. For those who speak English as their first language, we want to foster respect for and understanding of the different languages in our community.
When children make connections between languages (English, Irish and/or home languages), children can make their own inferences from the sounds of words, how they are written, and how they are used to convey meaning. This can include sign language, Cant, or creole languages. In this way, language awareness becomes not just a tool to support learning but also one of learning’s most valuable outcomes. It raises children’s self-confidence and engagement in learning.
We know too that children who know more than one language may not have the same skills or vocabulary in each – they may speak some and read or write in others, or they may acquire vocabulary in English or Irish at school but not know the corresponding vocabulary in their home languages, or vice versa.
Promoting home languages
We take a whole-school approach to the promotion of home languages. We create explicit opportunities across the curriculum for children to include their home languages in their learning and display this learning proudly. Here are some examples of how we promote home languages in our school:
Our Young Interpreters are a team of children who are trained to support their peers with language learning. The programme uses a mixture of formal and informal strategies to support children who are new to English when they arrive at our school. Informally, newly-arrived children are paired with children in their class who speaks the same language and act as a guide and friend for their first few days, explaining routines and helping them find their feet. Many children remember their first few days and are keen to help out new children.
The more formal programme matches older children with children in the younger classes who speak their language, over a longer period of time. The children meet together weekly and spend time getting to know one another, talking about their experience at school, sharing stories and writing their own texts in their home language and often in English too. The Young Interpreters team meet regularly with a support teacher to share ideas and identify any issues and also lead on language promotion across the school.
Providing children with access to high-quality books in their home language so that they can make connections between the languages they are learning is very important. We have an extensive range of dual-language books in children’s home languages in both the school library and in class libraries. Children often create their own dual-language texts too and share them in our libraries. We have a range of picture dictionaries and ‘talking pen’ resources and the older children use apps like ‘Google Translate’ to support their academic learning.
We seek support for developing language awareness from organisations who specialise in this work, including Mother Tongues Ireland. We use the Language Explorers programme to develop our multilingual approach to teaching and learning. Language Explorers activities are designed to raise awareness of linguistic diversity in the classroom and in the community and to promote an interest in language learning. With this programme we aim to
The Language Explorers programme gives children the opportunity to learn about languages through interactive games, art making, singing, storytelling and story writing. We invite parents/carers to share their languages as part these sessions and often invite artists and storytellers from different traditions to visit us too. Children become aware of their own language abilities and learn something new about one other and about the people who live in their local community.
We celebrate different events annually to acknowledge all of the languages spoken in our school including European Day of Languages and Heritage Language Day. We also use the languages spoken in our school during events or other celebrations, like having prayers in several languages at a prayer service, or introducing a performance in several languages or including different languages in an anti-bullying rap for Anti-Bullying Week.
We actively support opportunities for children to develop skills in their home language by providing information to parents/carers about heritage language classes and clubs available in Dublin. We have a strong link with the Romanian Embassy and provide after-school classes in language and culture for Romanian-speaking children every week. We also work closely with New Communities Partnership and run an after-school club for children who are new to English. Our Erasmus+ programme allows the children to meet with children and teachers from schools across Europe and interact with groups, who speak a variety of languages, online and through face-to-face visits.
We know that our languages are a core part of our identity. Our school planning reflects the global nature of our school community and we make conscious efforts to choose books, resources and learning themes that are reflective of that diversity. We engage with several programmes (including the Yellow Flag Programme) to celebrate the diversity in our community and to explictly teach our children about discrimination and racism and ways to tackle them, be upstanders and respect one another’s differences.