Read more about Language awareness

1. Language awareness

Language awareness is one of the main plural approaches to language teaching and learning, recommended in Europe (A Framework of Reference for pluralistic Approaches – FREPA, European Centre of Modern Languages). 

The teaching-learning activities concern all the languages present in the class (those included in the teaching curriculum and those that the school does not have the ambition to teach). It is based on a global and comparative approach between the various languages: the language of instruction, the students' mother tongues, curricular foreign languages, other languages present in the wider community, languages and forms of communication. 

2. Visibility, valorization and legitimation of all languages

Today it is acknowledged that we can be multilingual in many ways. We can have different levels of competence in different languages (in understanding, speaking, writing and reading). At any level every competence (even partial) is a linguistic and cognitive resource to be exploited and valued.

Visibility, valorization and legitimation of all languages, that can already be started in pre-school/nursery school, can be expanded in primary school. In this way, the start of the systematic learning of the majority language does not represent a fracture with the symbolic world of the mother tongue and all children are precociously sensitized to linguistic diversity.

According to this approach, what matters is not formal language ‘learning’, but an "education" to languages and through languages. At the pre-school and primary school levels, this approach can represent a first attempt at raising awareness of the multilingualism existing in a class and at unveiling the linguistic repertory and biography of each child.

3. Aims

The aims pursued within this approach concern:

• the acquisition of awareness of the diversity of languages,
• the promotion of a linguistic culture, i.e. knowledge that contributes to understanding our contemporary multilingual and multicultural reality and to feeling part of a multilingual community;
• the development of positive representations, attitudes, interest for all languages as treasures, as tools for understanding and  shaping the world, with all languages being equal;
• encouraging a harmonic personal relationship with all the languages of one’s life;
• the acquisition of awareness and agency on one's own linguistic repertories, practices, ways of learning languages;
• the development of meta-linguistic and meta-communicative skills by observing differences and similarities in the phonetic and structural characteristics of languages, by exploring different body movements, proximity  and gestures linked to communication, etc.   
  
  
  

4. Guiding principles

The activities in this section are consistent with the language awareness approach, and are guided by the following criteria:

• providing a safe environment where children feel confident, preventing a sense of shame, embarrassment, and insecurity;
• making different languages visible in the classroom/school, before starting to work on the children’s language repertoires. Even if in a limited way, this helps children to feel safe and to understand that it is ‘normal’ to talk about different languages;
• linking every suggested activity to the children’s experiences and perspectives;
• placing value on all languages (languages in the school curriculum, native languages, minority languages, dialects, but you may also consider body language, other codes of communication), not just on the languages that are more widely represented. Even if only a child speaks a language, that language should be included;
• providing engaging and playful ways to explore languages, one’s own linguistic repertory and biography,  nurturing motivation and enjoyment;
• valuing families’ and children’s resources;  
• involving children as protagonists, researchers and key-informants on their experience.

5. Glossary