5 December 2022

New published teaching material in collaboration with the publishing house Alinea

Through a collaboration between Natascha Drachmann and Alinea, a Danish publishing house, a new online teaching material on plurilingual education for language teaching in primary and lower secondary school (grade 1-9) has been published. The material is named Sproglige broer (‘Language bridges’).

The teaching material consists of three teaching plans for:

  • Danish and English teaching grade 1-3
  • Danish, English, French, and German teaching grade 4-6
  • Danish, English, French, and German teaching grade 7-9

The teaching material is developed based on the two operationalizations of plurilingual education and language awareness, developed in the PE-LAL project.

The material draws on plurilingual education by building bridges between languages that the students know from the school’s curriculum (Danish, English, French, German) and languages that the students not necessarily know (e.g., Arabic, Dutch, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish). By comparing languages and working with similarities and differences and linguistic transparency, the aim is to develop the students’ language awareness. An increased language awareness both enhances the students language learning and contributes to developing the students’ general language education.

The material creates affordances for developing the students’ language awareness. The practical language awareness is developed through play and games where the students experiment and engage with language. The metalinguistic awareness is enhanced when the students are reflecting on and talking about language, e.g., in conversations on similarities and differences between languages. The critical language awareness is strengthened by critically reflecting on language and language use. In the materials, language awareness is directed towards different levels of language, e.g., towards the pragmatic level in relation to politeness, towards the textual level in relation to genre texts or towards the lexical/semantic level in relation to word transparency.

Game with animal sounds from teaching material grade 1-3).

The three teaching plans consist of 8-9 lessons divided into four different themes. All three plans are starting with a theme on 'My language backpack' opening for the work on plurilingualism. In this theme, the students produce language portraits, language rainbows and language biographies to become aware of their own and the class's plurilingualism and how plurilingualism is an important and useful resource when learning languages.

Content in the three teaching plans.

The material contains detailed teacher guides with answer keys, suggestions for didactic organization, and information on the integrated languages.

Access to the material goes through Alinea’s online portal for Danish, English, French, and German (paid subscription required).

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