Primary Language Teachers Research Articles

Multilingual Awareness in L3 English and German Class in Primary School

The paper addresses the development of multilingual awareness of students in the fifth grade of primary school within the following language constellation L3 German after L2 English and L3 English after L2 German. The research focuses on two issues relating to the students’ ability to notice and verbalize cross-linguistic links in L3 – L2 – L1 systems. The research established that participants recognize, to a high degree, cross-lingual connections of the second foreign language (L3) with the first foreign language (L2) and the mother tongue (L1), and that the majority of students are able to verbalize them. What is more, a positive correlation has been established between noticing and explaining cross-lingual connections. The results show that 11-year-old students have the potential to develop elements of cross-linguistic and metalinguistic awareness based on which they can be exposed to systematic input directed towards developing multilingual awareness. Placing that finding in the context of previous research findings about the positive connectedness of the level of language awareness of multilinguals and their language competence, the paper discusses the need for introducing structured development of multilingual awareness into teaching third languages in primary school. Key words: cross-linguistic awareness; metalinguistic awareness; primary language education; plurilingual competence; third language acquisition

Comunicación oral y m-learning en el aula de inglés de primaria: la fotografía y el vídeo como recurso

The process of design, implementation and evaluation of the project ‘Films & Photographs: An M-learning Experience in Primary Education’ is presented in this article through the research-action methodology. The project´s main objective was to foster oral communication in the English language (as an additional language) using mobile devices in primary education through photography and video. Two English primary language teachers, two university lecturers and an in-service teacher advisor from the Teachers´ Training and Resource Centre participated in the project. The pupils, around ten and twelve years of age, belonged to two different schools in The Principality of Asturias, Spain and the project was developed during the school year 2015-2016. The techniques used to collect data were participant observation, semi structured-interviews and a questionnaire. The activities were focused on the use of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) to produce and edit videos and photographs. The results show students and teachers´ positive perception about m-learning since they consider it has directly influenced the motivation to carry out the proposed tasks. All this has an effect on the improvement of the communicative, technological and artistic competence in the primary education context.

Deaf lecturers’ translanguaging in a higher education setting. A multimodal multilingual perspective

AbstractIn a few universities around the world courses are offered where the primary language of instruction is a national sign language. Many of these courses are given by bilingual/multilingual deaf lecturers, skilled in both national sign language(s) and spoken/written language(s). Research on such deaf-led practices in higher education are lacking, and this study will contribute to a greater understanding of these practices. Drawing on ethnographically created data from a higher education setting in Sweden, this case study examines the use of different languages and modalities by three deaf lecturers when teaching deaf and hearing (signing) students in theoretic subjects. The analysis is based on video-recordings of the deaf lecturers during classroom activities at a basic university level in which Swedish Sign Language (SSL) is used as the primary language. The results illustrate how these deaf lecturers creatively use diverse semiotic resources in several modes when teaching deaf and hearing (signing) students, which creates practices of translanguaging. This is illustrated by classroom activities in which the deaf lecturers use different language and modal varieties, including sign languages SSL and ASL as well as Swedish, and English, along with PowerPoint and whiteboard notes. The characteristics of these multimodal-multilingual resources and the usage of them will be closely presented in this article.

Predictors of academic performance for finance students

PurposeThe study uses data drawn from a senior finance major cohort of 78 female undergraduates at Zayed University (ZU)-UAE to investigate factors, which increase the likelihood of achieving better academic performance in an Islamic finance course based on information about socioeconomic background of female students. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe research was conducted based on a survey designed to collect one-time individual data. Even though gender is considered as a variable affecting students’ performance as documented in the literature, it shall not be addressed in this study as the sample of our survey is limited to the female gender only. Whereas the population under investigation is a cohort of undergraduate female students enrolled at a finance course: Islamic finance and banking (BUS426) at one of the national universities in the UAE. ZU was established in 1998 by the federal government of the United Arab Emirates to educate UAE national women, in 2008 ZU started to accept male students in a separated campus building. The university is organized academically into six colleges: Arts and Sciences, Business Sciences, Communication and Media Sciences, Education, Information Technology, and University College. The primary language of instruction is English, though graduates are expected to be fully fluent in both English and Arabic (Zayed University, 2016). BUS426 is one of the major courses offered to students majoring in finance. The course is taught in English and requires mathematical skills on basic levels, but is mostly dependent on logical and critical thinking skills.FindingsThe study found that among the socioeconomic variables tested that being married, having a highly educated mother and having high pre-entry qualifications were significant variables as they increase the likelihood of an “A grade” performance.Originality/valueThe extent to which socioeconomic factors and lifestyle could contribute to student performance outcomes in an Arab culture setting is not clear due to the scarcity of research on this particular topic; hence the study attempts to fill this gap.

Towards identifying dyslexia in Standard Indonesian: the development of a reading assessment battery

With its transparent orthography, Standard Indonesian is spoken by over 160 million inhabitants and is the primary language of instruction in education and the government in Indonesia. An assessment battery of reading and reading-related skills was developed as a starting point for the diagnosis of dyslexia in beginner learners. Founded on the International Dyslexia Association’s definition of dyslexia, the test battery comprises nine empirically motivated reading and reading-related tasks assessing word reading, pseudoword reading, arithmetic, rapid automatized naming, phoneme deletion, forward and backward digit span, verbal fluency, orthographic choice (spelling), and writing. The test was validated by computing the relationships between the outcomes on the reading-skills and reading-related measures by means of correlation and factor analyses. External variables, i.e., school grades and teacher ratings of the reading and learning abilities of individual students, were also utilized to provide evidence of its construct validity. Four variables were found to be significantly related with reading-skill measures: phonological awareness, rapid naming, spelling, and digit span. The current study on reading development in Standard Indonesian confirms findings from other languages with transparent orthographies and suggests a test battery including preliminary norm scores for screening and assessment of elementary school children learning to read Standard Indonesian.

The Power of Implicit Teaching Practices: Continuities and Discontinuities in Pedagogical Approaches of Deaf and Hearing Preschools in Japan

Meisei Gakuen, a private school for the deaf in Tokyo, is the only school for the deaf in Japan that uses Japanese Sign Language (JSL) as the primary language of instruction and social interaction. We see Meisei as a useful case for bringing out core issues in Japanese deaf and early childhood education, as well as for making larger arguments about the contribution of what we call “implicit pedagogical practices.” In this article, we make Meisei the pivot point for two comparisons: (a) between the Meisei deaf preschool program and the programs of “regular” (nondeaf) preschools and (b) between Meisei’s JSL approach and the “total communication” approach used by the public deaf preschools. The implicit pedagogical practice we track across the three types of Japanese preschool settings is mimamoru, a hesitancy of teachers to intervene in children’s disputes and other social interactions.

The Benefits of Management and Organisation: A Case Study in Young Language Learners’ Classrooms

This study focuses on primary language education within a Greek region: specifically, on the positive effects of classroom management and organisation on a student-centred approach of teaching. In the case of the Greek education system, language teachers are encouraged to adopt student-centred approaches in their classroom but have not received any guidance on how to do so. Language educators are reluctant to abandon their teacher-centred ways, because they have not been trained to apply classroom management and organisation techniques that could support a student-centred environment.

Innovations in primary language teaching

An imminent best practice case study publication is to bring together a range of innovative languages projects being pioneered by Teaching School Alliances. Therese Comfort and Eva Oliver look at some examples

Communicative Interaction in Language Learning Tasks among EFL Learners

This paper explores peer-peer interactions of low proficiency level children using a spot-the-differences task in an EFL context in a language institute in Shiraz, Iran. The children were asked to practice with several sets of similar spot-the-differences tasks and the analysis focuses on the observable changes from the first to the last repetition. After the task performances were recorded, the children were invited to watch their first and last performances and comment on the changes they noticed in an interview. Both the analysis of their dialogues performing the tasks and their reflections clearly indicate that peer-peer interactions with this age group at a very low level of competence can bring various benefits and thus primary language teachers could consider introducing similar communication tasks with children with some confidence.

Language barriers

A new study focusing on global language learning finds that English-speaking education often provides less resource and encouragement for languages. Teresa Tinley and Therese Comfort consider the challenges common to successful primary language teaching

Ethnic Attitudes of Hungarian Students in Romania

Participants in this study were ethnic Hungarian secondary students attending high schools in Romania in which Hungarian was the primary language of instruction. Attitudes of participants toward ethnic and cultural groups were measured using a variation of the Bogardus (1933) Scale of Social Distance. Results were consistent with predictions based on Allport's intergroup contact theory. Students reported a wide range of tolerance levels for majority and minority ethnic groups with which they were likely to have contact in Romania. However, the students reported little difference in tolerance levels for groups that are not a recognized part of the Romanian cultural landscape, such as people of Hispanic origin, and Native Americans.

Indigenous Language Revitalization: Role of a Bilingual Speech-Language Pathologist

Due to the risk of language extinction, immersion education is being implemented by Aboriginal communities in Canada and the United States as a language revitalization strategy. This paper describes one successful initiative, the Biidaaban Kinoomaagegamik Immersion Program (BKIP), started in 2006 by the community of Sagamok Anishnawbek (population: 1,400) situated on the north shore of Lake Huron in northern Ontario. The students are educated in Anishnaabemowin (Ojibwe), the primary language of instruction, through the day from senior kindergarten (SK) to Grade 3 with one hour allotted daily to English-language study. Aboriginal speech-language pathologists (SLPs), as speakers of an Indigenous language, can play a critical role in immersion education and language preservation. The role of the bilingual SLP in immersion programs is multifaceted. The varied aspects and responsibilities of this role are discussed.

Primary languages in Northern Ireland: too little, too late?

There has been much debate in recent years about the future of primary language teaching in England, Scotland and Wales but relatively little discussion about the situation in Northern Ireland. This paper seeks to set the policy context in Northern Ireland where the provision for primary languages lags behind other regions of the United Kingdom and where the recently revised Northern Ireland curriculum has failed to make modern foreign language learning a statutory entitlement for pupils in primary schools. A number of positive but largely uncoordinated developments in primary language teaching in the province are examined but the conclusion is reached that, given the striking absence of languages as a statutory entitlement in the revised primary curriculum, the long-term future of language teaching in Northern Ireland remains regrettably insecure. A number of key proposals are outlined to remedy the situation.

Miss, can you speak French? – linking 'MFL', 'EAL' and 'English' in 'primary language teaching'

Miss, can you speak French? – linking 'MFL', 'EAL' and 'English' in 'primary language teaching'

Politics and Popular Culture: How Some Young Anglophone Canadians Perceive the Political Content of the Entertainment Media

This research, based on surveys of 456 young Canadians enrolled at universitieswhere English is the primary language of instruction, seeks answers to several basicquestions at the foundation of the inquiry into the impact of popular culture onyoung English-speaking Canadians' political beliefs. It investigates whether youngCanadians actually perceive any political messages in popular culture, and whetherthey think about these themes in a rigorous way. We investigate whether conservativeor liberal youths are more likely to agree or disagree with the politics of popularculture, and to what extent young Canadians' attitudes toward the socio-politicalcontent of the entertainment media are different from US youths' attitudes. Thisresearch also serves to link the passive and active theories of socialization, andto contribute to the debate over the existence of US cultural imperialism.

Some benefits of peer–peer interaction: 10-year-old children practising with a communication task

This paper explores peer–peer interactions of children using a spot-the-differences task in an EFL context in Hungary. The children were asked to practise with several sets of similar spot-the-differences tasks and the analysis focuses on the observable changes from the first to the last repetition. After the task performances were recorded, the children were invited to watch their first and last performances and comment on the changes they noticed in an interview. Both the analysis of their dialogues performing the tasks and their reflections clearly indicate that peer–peer interactions with this age group at a very low level of competence can bring various benefits and thus primary language teachers could consider introducing similar communication tasks with children with some confidence.

Young L2 learners' performance on a novel morpheme task

The teaching of an invented language rule has been proposed as a possible non‐biased, language‐independent assessment technique useful in differentiating young L2 learners with specific language impairment from their typically developing peers. The current study explores these notions by testing typically developing sequential bilingual children's ability to learn an invented language rule in either L1 (Spanish) or L2 (English). Participants were 20 children, age 3:6–5:8, who attended a Head Start programme. For all children, Spanish was the primary language spoken in the home and English was the primary language of instruction. Children were randomly assigned two groups. Group L1 was taught the novel language rule in Spanish; Group L2 was taught the novel language rule in English. Performance was better for the L1 group than for the L2 group. Moreover, not all of these typical language learners were able to learn the new rule, even in their strongest language. These findings suggest that even for typically developing children, specific language proficiency as well as individual differences are closely linked to performance on this novel morpheme learning task.

Ethnicity at School: ‘Non‐Russian’ Education in the Soviet Union during the 1930s

In the Soviet Union, the decade of the 1930s saw a remarkable rate of educational expansion, as state schools enrolled millions of pupils in higher proportions and for longer periods of time than ever before. Much of this expansion occurred in the ‘non‐Russian’ regions, where the native language of children and thus the primary language of instruction were something other than Russian. So‐called ‘national’ schools provided instruction in more than 70 different ‘native’ languages and enrolment exceeded 12 million by the end of the 1930s. Using a variety of published and archival sources, this article argues that Soviet education, like Stalinism more generally, promised to transcend ethnic differences even while perpetuating ethnic distinctiveness. These materials and interpretations suggest new ways of understanding how schools become sites for defining, contesting and negotiating identities.

The Discursive Malleability of an Identity

This article employs a dialogic approach, in the parlance of Bakhtin, to explore the ways in which a school smedium,its primary language of instruction, has become a major category of identity in North India. Many people describe themselves and others by invoking attendance at either a Hindi‐ or English‐medium school. The first task of this article is to account for what Bakhtin callscentripetal forcesthat enable people at different positions in terms of class or school experience to use a common duality of Hindiversus English‐medium and its attendant social resonances. The second task is to account for the abilities of a teacher to question the inevitability of the medium divide and to radically reframe what is important about schooling. Her abilities derive, in part, from her experiences with schools, attesting to Bakhtin s insight that centripetal forces in language are never total, and that centrifugal forces arise from complex engagements with institutions.

Exploring Intercultural Awareness in the Primary Modern Language Classroom: The Potential of the New Model of European Language Portfolio Developed by the Irish Modern Languages in Primary Schools Initiative (MLPSI)

This paper reflects a key concern for teacher trainers: how can primary language teachers promote the development of intercultural awareness among their pupils? It addresses the concept of intercultural awareness as it applies to young learners and refers more specifically to the context of the Irish primary classroom and its curriculum. It argues that the European Language Portfolio (ELP) provides a valuable framework to develop and describe young learners' experiences, awareness and attitudes in this area and outlines the role of the MLPSI ELP model as a valuable potential instrument for both teacher training and teaching practice in this area.