2019-10-01 / VLE PAGES

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.

Languages ​​spoken by children gain visibility and legitimacy in the school context, they become objects to reflect on and tools to play with. The reflection can be progressively extended by including a wider variety of languages. It can be enriched and diversified with other codes of communication (iconic language, gestural language, braille, sign language, animal languages...) and by referring to the different forms of human communication (oral and written, stylistic registers, text genres).

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