...build on prior knowledge. Total acceptance of the language that children bring with them
...extend social language into curriculum language.


Given such a situation, the first thing I would say is that we
must begin from where the children are: in other words
there can be no alternative in the initial stages to total
acceptance of the language the children bring with them.
We cannot afford to 'make a fresh start'. From there I would
go on to develop an awareness of difference among forms
of speech: at a fairly explicit level this might lead to the
recognition of interesting differences in the way different
people speak and the way they speak for different purposes.
Much less explicitly, it will enter into dramatic improvisation
- the need for a king to talk like a king and his wise men,
perhaps, to talk like a book. An acceptance of differences
seems to me more important throughout the whole junior
school age-range than any sense that approval narrows
down upon one form, the socially acceptable. And from
awareness of differences can grow, without anything of the
sort necessarily being formulated, the habit of adapting
speech to suit different purposes and occasions.
Language and Learning, p. 134

...ensure everyone works with everyone else. Using language to make sense of the world
Putting this at its simplest, what children use language for in
school must be 'operations' and not 'dummy runs'. They
must continue to use it to make sense of the world: they
must practise language in the sense in which a doctor
'practises' medicine and a lawyer 'practises' law, and not in
the sense in which a juggler 'practises' a new trick before he
performs it. This way of working does not make difficult
things easy: what it does is make them worth the struggle.
Language and Learning, p. 130
...move from concrete to abstract thinking.
In order to accept what is offered when we are told
something, we have to have somewhere to put it; and
having somewhere to put it means that the framework of
past knowledge and experience into which it must fit is
adequate as a means of interpreting and apprehending it.
Something approximating to 'finding out for ourselves'
needs therefore to take place if we are to be successfully
told. The development of this individual context for a new
piece of information, the forging of the links that give it
meaning, is a task that we customarily tackle by talking to
people.
A Language for Life: The Bullock Report (1975), 4.9
..provide motivating ways to go over the same topic more than once "Small circles in which vital and transforming events take place"
Walking down Euston Road ten days ago, I was thinking
about this occasion and wondering whether ''the age of the
classroom teacher'' was altogether too optimistic an idea to
be realistic. Then I saw, outside the Friends' House (the
Quaker headquarters), a poster which seemed to me as I
read it to be putting my thoughts into words. It contained a
quotation from Rufus Jones, an American Quaker in the
early years of this century: ''I pin my hopes to quiet
processes and small circles in which vital and transforming
events take place.''
Moving into the 'eighties, into rough waters with plenty of
problems, educational, social and political, I am not
pessimistic. I pin my hopes to quiet processes and small circles.