UNIT 1- LANGUAGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM-Knowing Language across Curriculum-BEd notes
Prepared by
Sabarish P
Contents
- Language as a tool for communication in variety contexts and across different disciplines- Need for acquisition of English as foreign language/second language
- Language across curriculum- meaning. Scope and significance
Knowing Language across Curriculum
Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC) is a term for school and college courses that allow students to study a foreign language or apply pre-existing knowledge of a foreign language outside of traditional language-learning classrooms.
LAC relates to linking different forms and aspects of language education within the school, particularly emphasising the role of language in all subject-matter learning.
LAC is a concept suggesting the importance of language work and language training in all non-linguistic subjects.
In a broad sense, LAC is a concept demanding a comprehensive model of language education as the basis of a whole school language policy.
LAC includes linking all languages as subjects (mother tongue education, foreign language education, second or third language education) and the language dimension in all other subjects.
As a concept, LAC acknowledges the fact that language education in school does not only take place in specific language subjects, but also in each and every other subject, in each and every school activity, across the whole curriculum.
LAC is important for qualifying young or adolescent learners so that they can function well within the school as an academic setting, benefit from the subject-based offers of the school, developing basic thinking and communication skills.
Language as a tool for communication in variety contexts and across different disciplines
Language is more than just the code as it also involves social practices of interpreting and making meanings.
The way language is taught reflects the way language is understood.
It is important to consider how language as code and language as social practice are balanced in the curriculum.
Language is at the heart of language teaching and learning and teachers need to constantly reflect on what language is; because, the understanding of language affects the way of teaching.
Traditionally, language is viewed as a code and is made up of words and a series of rules that connect words together.
If language is only viewed in this way, language learning just involves learning vocabulary and the rules for constructing sentences.
This understanding of language is, however, a very narrow one. It sees language as fixed and finite and does not explore the complexities involved in using language for communication.
An understanding of language as ‘open, dynamic, energetic, constantly evolving and personal’ encompasses the rich complexities of communication.
This expanded view of language also makes educational experience more engaging for students, as language is not a thing to be studied but a way of seeing, understanding and communicating about the world.
People use language for purposeful communication and learning a new language involves learning how to use words, rules and knowledge about language and its use in order to communicate with speakers of the language.
This understanding of language sees a language not simply as a body of knowledge to be learnt but as a social practice in which to participate.
Language is something that people do in their daily lives and something they use to express, create and interpret meanings and to establish and maintain social and interpersonal relationships.
It is not enough for language learners just to know grammar and vocabulary, but they also need to know how that language is used to create and represent meanings and how to communicate with others and to engage with the communication of others.
The development of awareness, of the nature of language and its impact on the world, is required.
The understanding of language becomes part of the professional stance and, as such, influences the curriculum, planning and classroom pedagogies.
Teachers who view language simply as a code, make acquiring grammar and vocabulary the primary, if not the only, goal of language learning.
Within such a limited approach, students do not begin to engage with language as a communicative reality but simply as an intellectual exercise or as a work requiring memorising.
The understanding of language affects what happens in the classroom and the ways in which learners begin to understand the relationship between their own languages and the languages of their learning.
If the language learning program focuses on the code, then it models a theory of language in which the relationship between two languages is simply a matter of code replacement, where the only difference is a difference in words.
If the language pedagogies focus on the interpretation and creation of meaning, language is learned as a system of personal engagement with a new world, where learners necessarily engage with diversity at a personal level.
Within a professional stance that understands language as a social practice, teachers need to ensure that students are provided with opportunities to go beyond what they already know and to learn to engage with unplanned and unpredictable aspects of language.
Learning language as a complex, personal communication system involves on-going investigation of language as a dynamic system and of the way it works to create and convey meanings.
The emphasis on on-going investigation and analysis assumes that learners are involved in learning which promotes exploration and discovery rather than only being passive recipients of knowledge.
Learners require learning skills which will give them independence as users and analysers of language.
Need for acquisition of English as foreign language/second language
The acquisition of a first language is inseparable from the acquisition of certain modes of thinking.
The higher cognitive functions do not develop spontaneously but are internalised from social interaction and language is the engine that drives this process of internalization.
Social speech (communication between two or more people) becomes egocentric speech (talking to oneself, e.g., in order to understand and solve a problem), which in turn becomes inner speech (thought articulated in – often fragmentary – language).
Inner speech is the basis for all forms of discursive thinking, including those on which education depends.
A child’s capacity for inner speech is developed and refined as the capacity for literate behaviour is developed and refined.
All normally endowed children learn to speak the language of their environment and this process is inseparable from their general cognitive development and their gradual socialization.
Depending on the environment in which they live, children will differ from one another in their early experience, and this will be reflected in their language, especially in the words they know.
All normally endowed children become native speakers of their first language.
Acquiring a second language
There are many differences between second and first language acquisition, including the following:
Unless it begins in early childhood, second language acquisition is not part of the learner’s primary cognitive development.
In most cases learners have much less time for second language acquisition than they had for first language acquisition.
The later second language acquisition begins, the more it is a necessarily conscious and intentional process.
The later second language acquisition begins, the more it is influenced by conscious motivational factors.
Five facts about second language acquisition
All learners of second languages subconsciously transfer grammatical properties of their first language to the second language.
Like first language acquisition, second language acquisition proceeds by stages and is characterised by developmental orders.
The learner’s knowledge of the second language develops systematically, which means that errors are not random.
Learners have variable intuitions about the second language and their production of it is variable at different stages of development.
Compared with native speakers, second language learners’ internalised grammatical knowledge is incomplete.
Three facts about second language teaching
A focus on linguistic form (grammar and orthography) is a necessary part of education for literacy in any language.
At the same time, there is a wealth of research to show that when language teaching is driven by formal grammatical instruction it has only limited success.
Second language teaching succeeds to the extent that it engages learners in spontaneous use of their target language.
Language across curriculum – Meaning
Languages Across the Curriculum (LAC) is a curricular enrichment program that provides students with the opportunity to use their skills in languages other than English in non-language courses.
LAC focuses on the importance of language in school education, for all subject-matter learning, across the whole curriculum.
Language develops mainly through its purposeful use, where domains need to be broadened.
Learning often involves talking, writing, shaping and moving, normally in reaction to perceptions. Learning often occurs through speaking or writing as much as through shaping and moving.
Language use contributes to and is a pre-requisite for cognitive development.
Language is the medium for reflecting learning, for improving it, for becoming autonomous.
Language across curriculum – Scope and significance
The goals of LAC are to support language development in each and every child, in all domains of language use, in each learning activity in school.
In addition to reading, writing, listening and speaking, all non-verbal ways of representation are used for communicating purposes.
Eight modes of human activities involving language are distinguished for communication:
Listening : comprehending oral input/intake
Speaking : constructing meaningful utterances
Reading : understanding written texts
Writing : producing written texts or discourse
Viewing : attending to visual signs or information
Shaping : using visual means of expression
Watching : attending to the movements
LAC aims to infuse foreign language across the curriculum, thus building on the skills of language proficient students in courses where authentic foreign language sources are not a regular component of the curriculum but would complement the course material.
Thus, students can extend their knowledge of a second language beyond foreign language courses and apply those skills to course materials, research and projects in non-language disciplines.
In addition, the inclusion of authentic course-relevant source materials in another language enriches course perspectives and prepares students more fully for the cross-cultural and multilingual demands of a global society.
LAC has been embraced by a number of academic institutions nationwide and is a readily identifiable means to indicate a student’s ability to engage in multilingual learning in preparation for the workplace and graduate study.
LAC can be considered as a form of initiation into new discourse behaviours and discourse communities by developing and using new language varieties, by extending one’s own competences, identities and personality.
Introducing LAC requires a radical change in the attitudes and mentality of the teachers involved, those already in service as much as those in teacher education.
Every teacher has to be confronted with the issues of academic language use, both oral and written, and trained so as to be prepared for teaching it within the subject matter courses later at school.
Every student teacher needs to learn how to define minimal goals or what to do with the goals he/she encounters within the school, the province or the national curriculum:
Which of those does he/she want to include, which of them can he/she afford not to include within the subject-matter teaching?
Which of them are needed by the learners for future development and participation in society?
Such important decisions require a high level of information and of professional competence in theory, in curricular matters and in teaching methodology.
Prepared by
Sabarish P
(MSc Physics, MEd, NET)Contact: pklsabarish@gmail.com
