6.3.7 Language Awareness
One of the initial lessons with each of the year 6 classes focused on how
greetings are carried out in the various first languages of the children in the
classroom. This lesson seemed of much benefit to all children for a number of
reasons. One, it shone a positive light on the linguistic diversity represented in
the class and two, a degree of awareness of language was fostered in making
children aware of how the act of 'greeting' was carried out in different or in
similar ways to that of their first language. The multilingual classroom in School
Two thus presented a natural context for talking about language:
"...in terms of increasing (raising) the amount of conscious knowledge in each
individual through new and explicit input, from teachers, or better still, from
one's peers, via the perceptive teacher's mediation." (James & Garrett,1991: 7)
As a result of this lesson children were made aware of some differences and
similarities between cultures and languages and for some implicit knowledge
would have been turned into explicit knowledge. Laughing at each Otheris
efforts to speak another language and racist gestures or remarks, for example,
were also absent at least during the lessons observed.
How 'knowing' two languages might affect the learning of a third language is not
within the scope of this research and much would seem to depend on the stage
of children's development in each language, on their degree of bilingualism and
on the language pairs involved. Research in Holland by Meijers & Sanders and
Edelenbos, Pjil & Vinje suggested that:
326