Importance of Language in the Curriculum

Policy making in education has largely been predicated on the principle that all students have equal access to the same social and cultural tools. In other words, knowledge is presented as equally accessible for all students, carries a universal truth and has no bias towards one social group or another. This presents two key challenges:

Ensuring that curriculum experiences provide the necessary vocabulary for pupils to relate substantive knowledge (core knowledge within a subject domain) with the related inter-disciplinary knowledge needed to make sense of learning.
Providing pupils with the tools needed to articulate and express their learning in a mature way.

An alternative view to consider is that vocabulary, knowledge and language structures are inherently connected to personal experience, largely determined by home access to words, books, discussion and opportunities to engage in conversation. Schools can provide a levelling of these experiences through rich curriculum provision, allowing pupils to make greater sense of the world around them. Language leads to sense making.

Recently there has been criticism that our culture of measuring learning through testing makes it harder for some disadvantaged pupils to succeed because they do not necessarily have the same culture understanding of language or words used out of context, compared to more privileged families who may provide rich, diverse cultural experiences. In other words, as Robin Alexander writes in Towards Dialogic Teaching:

“political prejudice and the inherited educational culture have continued to frustrate the breakthrough which is needed. What adds urgency to this agenda is that children’s access to opportunities for talk outside school vary considerably, as do the quality and potency of the talk they encounter”.

Building on this argument, Gordon Wells, in ‘The Meaning Makers’ established the importance of language development requires both meaningful context and opportunities to test and explore how words can help learners make sense of the world, from the child’s perspective.

So too, is this process of learning equally valuable for the parent. This highlights the importance of language as a tool to make sense of knowledge within curriculum but also language as a social exchange. On the latter point, the social nature of learning is equally significant for the adult so that they can be responsive to the cues, gestures and expressions of communication. In this way, the child also teaches the adult how to talk or respond in such a way as to make it easier for them to learn. The learning is co-constructed between both child and adult. As Gordon Wells writes:

“Talking with young children is thus very much like playing ball with them. What the adult has to do for this game to be successful is, first, to ensure that the child is ready with arms cupped, to catch the ball. Then the ball must be thrown gently and accurately so that it lands squarely in the child’s arms. When it is the child’s turn to throw, the adult must be prepared to run wherever it goes and bring it back to where the child really intended it to go”.

Learning then is ambivalent to hierarchy or authority. The teacher has as much to learn by throwing the ball in the right place, as the child who catches it. Just as we have over inflated the role accountability plays in our school system, so too have we over stated the role of teacher instruction in enabling learning. This would support the argument made by Graham Nuttall in The Hidden Lives of Learners that students learn more from each other than they do from an individual teacher.

Learning comes from opportunities to collaborate, engage in opportunities to make sense of the world and apply learning within a range of contexts that matter to the child. When we create a classroom environment where we are all learners together, we become investors in everyone’s learning. If we don’t know where to throw the ball, we limit opportunities for others to catch the ball. Therefore, social learning requires a deep focus on the vocabulary and language to build knowledge and continuous assessment of the learner’s needs, as well as the opportunity to test and practise the learning in different ways.

Throughout the curriculum framework, we have made reference to the importance of language and oracy, as essential tools to equip learners with the lifelong dispositions and specific knowledge required to make sense of the world and extend meaning beyond and between subject disciplines.

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