The Organized Chaos In The PYP Classroom

When we talk about language in the PYP, it’s easy to drift into checklists: reading, writing, speaking, listening. But the updated subject overview invites us to step back and reconsider; not just what language is, but what it means to learners and what it makes possible.

Language is the way students express who they are, construct meaning, participate in inquiry, and connect with others. In the Primary Years Programme, language runs through every subject, every interaction, every act of agency.

Identity, Agency, Connection & Understanding

This shift in how we view language is reflected across a thoughtful set of IB documents that work together to reposition language as essential, relational, and transformative:

The Language Subject Overview (2025): reframes language as both a subject on its own and a medium for learning across disciplines, with strong links to identity, agency, culture, and conceptual understanding.

The Additional Language(s) Learner Pathway: offers a flexible, phase-based map focused on three aspects: interaction, identity & culture, and constructing text. It recognizes that language growth is personal, dynamic, and non-linear.

The IB Language Tenets: outline 15 guiding beliefs about language as a tool for making meaning, building relationships, and accessing multiple worldviews through multimodal expression.

Student Language Portraits: provide practical ways to co-construct each learner’s linguistic identity and support language-rich planning.

Collaborative Planning Tools: support schools in designing responsive, translanguaging friendly learning experiences through a shared set of reflective prompts.

Practical Ways to Engage with the Pathway: classroom examples and strategies that embed culture, multilingualism, and identity into everyday practice, from word walls to culture corners.

Making Sense of the IB Language Resources: Theory to Practice

The IB PYP Language resources signal a mindset shift in how we understand and support language learning. For schools where most students are language learners, this shift is essential.

But let’s be honest. With so many new documents; tenets, pathways, portraits, planning cards, it’s easy to feel like we’re staring at a puzzle without the box lid. The pieces are rich, detailed, and meaningful… but where do we begin?

This post is meant to be that box lid. I want to help fellow educators move from theory to practice, to build a clearer understanding of what’s behind these resources, and how we can use them to design purposeful planning and responsive learning.

We’ll explore this shift in three parts:

Philosophy: What do we believe about language and why does it matter?

Planning: How do we design learning that reflects those beliefs?

Learning: What does it actually look like in the classroom?

Philosophy – What do we believe about language and why does it matter?

As IB educators, we should rethink why we teach language, and what kind of language learning matters in an international, inquiry-based context.

Here’s what the core documents are telling us loud and clear:

The IB Language Tenets remind us that:

• Language isn’t static or neutral, it’s personal, contextual, and multimodal.
• Every student walks into our classroom with a linguistic repertoire that’s rich, complex, and valuable.
• Language development isn’t linear, it grows through relationships, purpose, and culture.

“Multilingualism is not a challenge to solve. It’s a resource to honor.”

The Language Subject Overview takes this further:

• It reframes language as both a subject and a medium for learning across all disciplines.
• It centres identity, learner agency, and inquiry as key reasons we teach language in the PYP.
• It challenges us to see language as a tool for thinking, expressing, connecting, and taking action.

The Student Language Portraits:

• Invite us to document and understand each learner’s language journey, not just proficiency levels, but how they use language to belong, create, and make sense of the world.

So what does this mean for us?
Before we pull out planning templates or update our scope and sequence, we’re called to pause and ask:

What do we believe about how students learn language?
How do our current practices reflect (or contradict) those beliefs?
What might we need to let go of in order to move forward?

This shift is especially urgent in schools where most learners are navigating the curriculum in a second (or third!) language. For them, language is not just the subject of learning, it’s the condition of learning.

Next, let’s explore how we turn these beliefs into design choices that empower students as language learners.

Planning – How do we design learning that reflects those beliefs?

Once we’ve clarified what we believe about language, the next question is:
How do we translate those beliefs into our planning process?

This is where things often fall apart, not because we don’t care, but because we’re juggling units, assessments, curriculum reviews, and five other things before lunch. The updated language resources don’t ask us to do more, but to be more intentional with what we’re already doing.

Let’s break it down into three simple planning moves:

Step 1: Clarify the Purpose and Profile

Before you begin a unit, take time to revisit:

• What do we know about the language learners in our room?

Use these tools:

• Student Language Portraits: Review or co-construct them to understand students’ linguistic repertoires.
• Additional Language Learner Pathway: Use the three lenses (interaction, identity & culture, constructing text) to reflect on where students are and what experiences will support them.

💡 Tip: Don’t rush this step. How you see your learners shapes everything else.

Step 2: Co-Construct Meaningful Goals

Planning shouldn’t be done to students. It should be done with them, especially when it comes to language. Use these questions from the Collaborative Planning Cards to guide your team:

• What do we want students to know, understand, and do with language?
• How can we integrate language purposefully into our units as a medium of thinking and learning?

Use these tools:

• Planning Cards & Templates: These provide simple, adaptable prompts to make language visible during team conversations.
• Subject Overview: Clarifies the role of the language educator in supporting language learners.

💡 Tip: Choose one or two language-specific goals for each unit and track how students grow toward them.

Step 3: Map for Transfer and Flexibility

Language doesn’t stay in one lesson. It shows up in thinking routines, case studies, writing pieces, provocations, reflections, and play. So our planning needs to reflect that.

Ask:

• Where can we embed language goals into transdisciplinary learning?
• How will we scaffold for multilingual learners?
• Are there chances for translanguaging or showcasing home languages?

Use these tools:

• Practical Ways to Use the Pathway: Offers examples like multilingual word walls, culture corners, student-led vocabulary routines.
• Learner Pathway & Language Subject Continuum: Plan for flexible movement across phases based on student needs, not grade levels.

💡 Tip: Think beyond classroom walls, language grows in relationships, community events, visual displays, and engaging with others in different situations.

When we plan for language intentionally, we’re not just teaching students to communicate. We’re teaching them to take part in their own learning, to reflect, question, persuade, belong, and contribute.

Learning – What does it actually look like in the classroom?

Now that we’ve explored the beliefs and planned with intention, we arrive at the heart of it all: the learning that happens in our classrooms; messy, joyful, reflective, and rich.

This is where our philosophy and planning come to life, not in perfect execution, but in the choices students make with language, the risks they take, the patterns they notice, and the voices they begin to find.

Meaningful language learning requires us, as educators, to:

• Plan for engaging learning experiences that students find relevant
• Chunk instruction and scaffold it intentionally
• Be clear about our expectations and what success looks like
• Provide authentic and multiple opportunities to practice newly acquired skills
• Offer learning tools (word banks, models, sentence stems, rubrics) students can return to when they feel stuck
• Regularly celebrate small and big successes to build confidence and momentum

Student voice in language choices

When students are given agency in how they communicate; through talk, gesture, writing, art, home languages, or translation tools, we’re seeing language learning as flexible and purposeful.

Try this:

• Use student language portraits to co-create language goals:
  “I want to feel confident explaining things in English.”
  “I want to use German in my poem.”
  “I want to remember new words by drawing them.”

This builds identity, reflection, and ownership, not just fluency.

Visible Multilingualism

If your displays only show English, your learners might assume that only one kind of knowledge counts.

Try this:

• Create multilingual word walls that connect to current units, ATL skills and student languages. When students see their languages in the classroom, they see themselves.
• Use the culture corner idea from the practical tools document to spark conversations around identity and language.

Language as a tool for thinking

Are we only assessing how well students spell, or are we noticing how they use language to reason, persuade, reflect, and connect? Language is a tool for learning, not just something to perform.

Try this:

• Use sentence stems, guiding questions, and metacognitive prompts in multiple languages.
• Encourage journaling and sketching in whatever language helps students process most deeply.

Flexible progress

Language learning isn’t linear. One student might quickly understand how to structure a persuasive text but take longer to develop confidence in oral discussions. Another might use rich vocabulary in storytelling but need time to organize their ideas clearly in writing. Progress looks different for every learner and unfolds on different timelines.

Try this:

• Use the Language Learner Pathway and Language Subject Overview to document growth in phases, not grades.
• Let students choose samples that show how they’ve progressed across contexts, not just subjects.

So Where Do We Begin?

We’re not being asked to add more, we’re being invited to see language differently. To recognize it not just as a subject to teach, but as a way of being, learning, connecting, and belonging.

This shift matters most in the spaces where students are learning in more than one language, where language is not just how they express understanding, but how they access it.

So let’s begin by:

• revisiting what we believe about language,
• planning with our learners’ strengths and backgrounds in mind,
• and creating classroom spaces where all voices are heard, celebrated, and grown.

You don’t need to do it all at once. Choose one entry point. Try one shift. Reflect with one colleague. That’s how a paradigm shift begins, not with overwhelm, but with intention.

Looking to go deeper with this in your school? I offer coaching and workshops for teams and curriculum leaders. [Learn more here.]