Strategies for developing target langauge competence in primary classrooms

The end of my post yesterday turned inevitably to teacher competence and  a consideration of what we need to do in our specific contexts to maximise what  children bring to the classroom. Novelette ended with this also.  The  reference list in this discussion provides some good examples for further discussion.Traditionally,  the debate  has been about Jamaican Creole as the medium of instruction in school, with all books and classroom discourse using Creole. This has been rehearsed many times but my experience with the Language Education Policy suggests that it will not happen in Jamaica. Our specific linguistic and sociolinguistic context would not support the introduction of a full bilingual programme. Dennis Craig  spent his life researching the language of primary school children in the Caribbean and  Jamaica in particular.  His idea of a transitional bilingual programme came from of his recognition that Creole speaking children needed “continuity of cognitive growth”. They needed the opportunity to continue to use their mother tongue in school  to develop  critical and problem-solving  skills that might be hindered with the abrupt transfer to formal  literacy in English (“language by eye”) on entry to  school. This meant that students needed to have timetabled periods when they would be allowed to talk freely in the vernacular with oral activities that allowed for higher level thinking e.g. listening comprehension. At another time tabled period they would use English, developing a communicative understanding of English as something more that phonic exercises and grammatical items. This is a transitional bilingualism programme that would operate only until the child had acquired enough English to be able to manage the appropriate grade curriculum. I have looked at the research for similar classes for Spanish kindergarten children in places such as California. In their partial immersion programmes, children might have English with one teacher and Spanish with another. Or they might simply have Spanish activities in one classroom and English in another. In this scenario, the 2 languages are kept physically apart. It is an interesting orientation to how Creole could be used.The type of immersion that has gained ground in Jamica is the Book Flood approach, which emphasises literature as a way of immersing young children in the target  language. Certainly, it responds to the challenge of variable input that Jamaican children are exposed to, but it is not an approach that has paid sufficient attention to the language children are bringing to the classroom – integrating Craig’s noticing strategies in the literature to augment response. Nevertheless literature is very, very important in the primary classroom. Language educators such as Velma Pollard and even Craig have given us some content ideas about how we can use the Jamaican language - in the use of folk and traditional literature; the use of poetry, songs, stories, rhymes and riddles. Cultural content energises and motivates students to pay attention to language- if so guided by the language aware teacher who has that explicit knowledge. Language awareness includes paying  attention to contrasts between the two languages to recognise the distinction.... The discussion so far is offering a number of strategies and ideas. Good practices can be found but cannot always be simply replicated. In my article provided on this web site, it can be seen that I  used research on good practice  in Jamaican classrooms to suggest   not another methodology (or is it methodolatry?)  but  4 design principles that can be applied to any  lesson or set of activities. They are immersion, practice, structured support and contrast.With immersion, the question would be to consider how much access to input  the classroom activity provides. This relates not just to the content but to the processes also.  So in a literature class, they might include such as read alouds shared reading,  echo reading , daily reading etcWith respect to practice, the teacher might want to consider the  opportunities  offered for authentic practice of different kinds and in varying contexts that are distributed  in time and executed with increasing  complexity.Structured support   involves a check on how the planned language activities scaffold, guide and supports  the learners.Finally the critical contrast principle is concerned with asking the fundamental question we started with. Does the lesson planned help the learners to notice differences, keep the languages separate and thus make sense of variable input? Does it draw on the students’ own language to do that, by maiximising their intuitions about language?The idea of teaching by principles underscores the teacher education issue. It is asking for high levels of teacher language awareness (TLA) from Jamaican teachers. It forces teachers to think through and plan using design principles rather than approved formatsWhy not set the goals and the parameters and train teachers well, so that they feel empowered to work in this way?To misquote  Shaggy “Do we dare?”