cohesion - European Centre for Modern Languages

“Watch me grow” appeared in the children’s home languages. Again, as in the
“language flower” activity, dialogue was established with parents who had been sent a
note by the teacher asking them to translate the phrase into their respective languages
and to teach the child how to pronounce it.
These and other such activities were put on display for parents who were invited to
attend an intercultural morning at the end of the school year. This event further
strengthened links with parents and was seen as another way of reinforcing the message
that their languages and cultures were valued. One of the parents, of Indian origin,
brought along children’s books written in his mother tongue and taught teachers, pupils
and the other parents how to pronounce different words. The event brought language
issues centre stage and prompted interesting discussions with parents about the
languages they use at home and questions on their part about how they should be
managing their children’s bilingualism.
Conclusions
This stage of the project had a number of outcomes. In the first instance, it sensitised
teachers and pupils in the junior infants’ class to linguistic diversity and made the
teachers involved in the project more consciously aware of the range of languages
spoken in the classroom and how to deal more positively with the linguistic diversity of
their pupils.
Secondly, through the development and testing of different multilingual and languageawareness
activities, teachers were exposed to some of the practical ways in which they
can incorporate linguistic diversity into their classroom. At the end of the project they
felt more confident and better equipped to deal with situations in which four or five
languages were present in the classroom both in terms of resources available to them
and the types of methodologies they could use.
The third outcome which can be identified is that, through the project, a dialogue was
created with parents, who became key players in the development and creation of the
multilingual activities.
The fourth important outcome of the project was the extended effect that it had on other
teachers and classes within the school. Although the main focus of the project was on
developing multilingual activities in the junior infants’ class, the project also had a
positive effect on teachers from other classes. The first class teacher, for instance,
adapted the “language flower” activity and used the different ways of saying “hello” to
create a poster representing linguistic diversity in her own classroom.
The topic of linguistic diversity also began to emerge in the staffroom and teachers
shared ideas and views about multilingualism. The enthusiasm with which the first
stage of the project was received has opened the way for the second phase of the
project which will begin in October 2007 and will involve the piloting of multilingual
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