Natural Semantic Metalanguage: a bridge between languages in the classroom

This pilot project uses Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) to promote plurilingual students’ use of their first language (L1) in the classroom. NSM is a linguistic theory describing a very simple language consisting of 65 universal words (primes) which can be used to explicate the meaning of semantically complex words (Goddard, 2018). NSM has been used in the second language context before (Fernández, 2016). Plurilingual students’ use of their entire linguistic repertoires in the classroom strengthens their linguistic competences, plurilingual identity (Stille & Cummins, 2013) and the students’ linguistic awareness and appreciation (Drachmann et al., 2021). It can be difficult to draw on students’ L1 in the classroom if the teacher does not know each student’s L1. We hypothesize that NSM can be suitable to give plurilingual students the possibility to use their L1 in the classroom and improve children’s linguistic awareness. The aim of the pilot project was to examine (1) how children can use NSM to describe word meanings, (2) how plurilingual students’ L1 can be included in the classroom through NSM. We taught how to use NSM to a class of 4th grade students in a Danish primary school, which has not been done before. We run two workshops 4 hours each, where students explicated the Danish words empati ’empathy’ and kærlighed ’love’, plurilingual students translated explications into their L1 and explicated culture-specific words from their L1. We made ethnographical field notes, a group interview with the class, and individual interviews with 9 plurilingual students about their experiences with the NSM-project. The presentation will contain a summary of the data analysis and future perspectives for the use of NSM in the classroom will be discussed.

Drachmann, N., Löbl, S. K., & Søgaard, K. (2021). Interkulturel og flersproget competence: en integreret tilgang på tværs af fremmedsprogsfagene. Sproglæreren, 3, 610.
Fernández, S. S. (2016). Etnopragmatik og interkulturel kompetence: Didaktiske nytænkninger i fremmedsprogsundervisningen. Ny Forskning i Grammatik, 23, 38-53.
Goddard, C. (2018). Ten Lectures on Natural Semantic Metalanguage. BRILL.
Stille, S., & Cummins, J. (2013). Foundation for learning: Engaging plurilingual students’ linguistic repertoires in the elementary classroom. Tesol Quarterly, 47(3), 630-638.