Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Apr 28, 2009 10:21:17 GMT
The teaching of languages leaves a lot to be desired in Ireland, as it does throughout the English-speaking world. The contrast between here and continental Europe is staggering, though I must say, southern Europe does not perform as well as northern Europe.
The problem begins with Irish, and for the record, I am pro-compulsory Irish, but not as it is now (I'll come back to this). The regime of teaching Irish in primary schools from the early 70s to the mid 90s is a fascinating illustration of what happens when linguistic educationalists are allowed to go too far with their fantasies. What happened was a cohort of young school inspectors studied models used in the American armed forced for teaching Vietnamese to their personnel. This meant you learned a core of commonly used words and phrases with a grammatical basis and necessity would bring out required Vietnamese: i.e. if a G.I. got stranded in some Vietnamese village in the middle of nowhere, he would have enough of the lingo to get by and even develop a competancy in it. This does work well if you are parachuted into a place like this and are forced to put what you learned to use (Hazelireland has described a much gentler version of the process in his German experiences). The system points toward Immersion, which is the most effective way of learning any language. But the flaw in the method is that Irish school children are not necessarily going to be in situations where they will have to use Irish, and what is latent remains latent.
It is a little ironic that an ex-army officer, Dómhnaill Ó Lubhlaí tested this out in founding Coláiste na bhFiann in Ros Muc in 1968. Coláiste na bhFiann changed the whole face of the Gaeltacht experience in two ways. Ó Lubhlaí went from the army to teaching English in Egypt before taking a job as teacher of Irish at second level. From what I know of Coláiste na bhFiann and TEFL, it seems the Berlitz method, total immersion, was applied. To go to Coláiste na bhFiann, you committed yourself to speak Irish exclusively for three weeks on a 24/7 basis; the punishment for speaking one sentence of English was immediate expulsion and this rule was vigourously enforced (a bit too zealously; a regular feature on daytime radio in the summer holidays is the case of another kid who has been sent home from Coláiste na bhFiann on their first day because they slipped into English and said a complete sentence by accident). Well, for people who get through the 21 days successfully, they are pretty fluent in Irish (it even takes time to adjust back to English) and Ó Lubhlaí's real revolution was to make it compulsory for successful graduates of the programme to attend a nationally organised Irish-speaking club (Cumann na bhFiann) in the course of the year. This wasn't as vigourously enforced, but enough of the kids made the effort to attend Cumann na bhFiann to make it a success. It meant that an opportunity was afforded to the kids to keep up their Irish through the year and they weren't back at square one on their second course - which had a corresponding knock-on effect of driving the standard up among the students and the new kids benefitted. The consequence was that the grants that the Departments of Education and the Gaeltacht pay for any of these summer courses are now conditional on the organisation providing all year round Irish-speaking activities for the kids who go to the Gaeltacht. Now, before someone reminds me, Ó Lubhlaí made an exit from the Irish language movement just over a decade ago under the shadow of allegations of paedophilia, which also changed the culture of the summer colleges.
In one way the existence of this private supplementary education raises questions about the quality of Irish in the schools (particularly primary where the foundations are supposed to be laid). It means that for kids not attending Gaelscoileanna or Gaeltacht schools, those whose parents/guardians can afford this process have an unfair advantage. But on the other hand, the summer colleges provide an opportunity for appreciation of the Irish language and culture in an alternative educational environment and to do things that school cannot cover. For many Irish people, their only experience of co-education between infant school and the Leaving Certificate was at these summer colleges.
However, to return to my point, primary school should deliver to students a level of spoken Irish which might benefit from this sort of immersion course for improvement, but which would teach a child how to learn a language in preparation for doing a continental language in secondary school. Indeed, why wait until secondary school? Fifth class in primary school is a good time to start serious language learning - this is the age and stage that German children begin learning English. I would see Irish as complementary to modern continental languages - though it is timely to ask about the possibility of reviving the teaching of Latin. Latin is not only an excellent foundation for learning all the Romance languages - French, Italian and Spanish as far as the Irish system is concerned - it also makes the German grammatical system much more intelligible (in the Bavarian Gymnasium stream, they say you cannot learn German properly unless you know some Latin), not to mention much of the English language - and there are many reasons for learning Latin other than linguistic. In fact, some of the arguments for learning Irish and Latin are similar, that they relate to culture and identity rather than linguistic use.
To re-cap on the topic of the Irish language, most Irish students acquire a latent knowledge of Irish. If they need it later - for example, to register as a secondary teacher or to pass the Irish exams that both the Kings' Inns and the Law Society has (NB: Irish is the 1st official language of the state and where there is a divergence between legislation in the two official languages, Irish takes precedence. I am not saying I agree with this - I am just stating the case. My advice to any intending home schoolers in Ireland is to be aware of the necessity of Irish for certain professions and other opportunities.) But latentcy is not good enough. It is also shameful to see the quality of English throughout Northern Europe. The Dutch language is no more inherently difficult than any other language - but it is hard to learn Dutch. The reason why is your average Dutchman speaks English and German fluently and possibily French and a fourth language too and his view is, why should he speak to you with you bad Dutch when he can deal with you much better in his own language. The Dutch government have begun to make it a requirement for non-EU nationals to learn Dutch as so many of them were getting by in English. Similar situations apply in Scandanavia. With regard to Germany, I have taken to advising students who are studying German to avoid cities like Munich, Frankfurt or Stuttgart and go to small towns and when there to talk to middle aged or older people. This is so that they would not take the opportunity of speaking English when it would do them more good to speak German. It gets easier in Southern Europe, though any of the tourist places in Spain, Portugal and Italy have plenty of English speakers.
I recall a push by the German government to fund the teaching of German in Ireland in the late 1980s. The main argument for learning German was the amount of trade between Ireland and Germany. There are a great many cultural arguments for learning German too. But on economics, I would argue that it makes more business sense to learn Italian and Spanish than French or German, as it is easy to do business with the Germanophone or Francophone worlds through English and more difficult with Spain, Italy or Latin America. Indeed, there is an argument for Portugese given the pontential of the Brazilian market. But I do not believe that educational policy need be dictated by the current needs of IBEC.
Finally, Hazelireland mentioned science which was of a high quality in Ireland. Well, the standard of Maths has fallen considerably and that will not help the sciences (or economics or business). I think that the traditional emphasis on hard sciences such as physics and chemistry has moved to what are perceived to be more practical such as information technology. Now don't get me wrong - I am not saying this is not important, but I do think we should hold on to high standards in maths/physics/chemistry. Regarding information technology, though, I know some people who made the jump from Latin to computers and found one a good preparation for the other. I found men who took physics, applied maths and maths at higher level would often prefer Latin to a modern continental language to fulfil their NUI third language requirement. Probably something to do with the logical grammar stuctures within the Latin language.
But education - linguistic, scientific or cultural - always needs to be watched over.
The problem begins with Irish, and for the record, I am pro-compulsory Irish, but not as it is now (I'll come back to this). The regime of teaching Irish in primary schools from the early 70s to the mid 90s is a fascinating illustration of what happens when linguistic educationalists are allowed to go too far with their fantasies. What happened was a cohort of young school inspectors studied models used in the American armed forced for teaching Vietnamese to their personnel. This meant you learned a core of commonly used words and phrases with a grammatical basis and necessity would bring out required Vietnamese: i.e. if a G.I. got stranded in some Vietnamese village in the middle of nowhere, he would have enough of the lingo to get by and even develop a competancy in it. This does work well if you are parachuted into a place like this and are forced to put what you learned to use (Hazelireland has described a much gentler version of the process in his German experiences). The system points toward Immersion, which is the most effective way of learning any language. But the flaw in the method is that Irish school children are not necessarily going to be in situations where they will have to use Irish, and what is latent remains latent.
It is a little ironic that an ex-army officer, Dómhnaill Ó Lubhlaí tested this out in founding Coláiste na bhFiann in Ros Muc in 1968. Coláiste na bhFiann changed the whole face of the Gaeltacht experience in two ways. Ó Lubhlaí went from the army to teaching English in Egypt before taking a job as teacher of Irish at second level. From what I know of Coláiste na bhFiann and TEFL, it seems the Berlitz method, total immersion, was applied. To go to Coláiste na bhFiann, you committed yourself to speak Irish exclusively for three weeks on a 24/7 basis; the punishment for speaking one sentence of English was immediate expulsion and this rule was vigourously enforced (a bit too zealously; a regular feature on daytime radio in the summer holidays is the case of another kid who has been sent home from Coláiste na bhFiann on their first day because they slipped into English and said a complete sentence by accident). Well, for people who get through the 21 days successfully, they are pretty fluent in Irish (it even takes time to adjust back to English) and Ó Lubhlaí's real revolution was to make it compulsory for successful graduates of the programme to attend a nationally organised Irish-speaking club (Cumann na bhFiann) in the course of the year. This wasn't as vigourously enforced, but enough of the kids made the effort to attend Cumann na bhFiann to make it a success. It meant that an opportunity was afforded to the kids to keep up their Irish through the year and they weren't back at square one on their second course - which had a corresponding knock-on effect of driving the standard up among the students and the new kids benefitted. The consequence was that the grants that the Departments of Education and the Gaeltacht pay for any of these summer courses are now conditional on the organisation providing all year round Irish-speaking activities for the kids who go to the Gaeltacht. Now, before someone reminds me, Ó Lubhlaí made an exit from the Irish language movement just over a decade ago under the shadow of allegations of paedophilia, which also changed the culture of the summer colleges.
In one way the existence of this private supplementary education raises questions about the quality of Irish in the schools (particularly primary where the foundations are supposed to be laid). It means that for kids not attending Gaelscoileanna or Gaeltacht schools, those whose parents/guardians can afford this process have an unfair advantage. But on the other hand, the summer colleges provide an opportunity for appreciation of the Irish language and culture in an alternative educational environment and to do things that school cannot cover. For many Irish people, their only experience of co-education between infant school and the Leaving Certificate was at these summer colleges.
However, to return to my point, primary school should deliver to students a level of spoken Irish which might benefit from this sort of immersion course for improvement, but which would teach a child how to learn a language in preparation for doing a continental language in secondary school. Indeed, why wait until secondary school? Fifth class in primary school is a good time to start serious language learning - this is the age and stage that German children begin learning English. I would see Irish as complementary to modern continental languages - though it is timely to ask about the possibility of reviving the teaching of Latin. Latin is not only an excellent foundation for learning all the Romance languages - French, Italian and Spanish as far as the Irish system is concerned - it also makes the German grammatical system much more intelligible (in the Bavarian Gymnasium stream, they say you cannot learn German properly unless you know some Latin), not to mention much of the English language - and there are many reasons for learning Latin other than linguistic. In fact, some of the arguments for learning Irish and Latin are similar, that they relate to culture and identity rather than linguistic use.
To re-cap on the topic of the Irish language, most Irish students acquire a latent knowledge of Irish. If they need it later - for example, to register as a secondary teacher or to pass the Irish exams that both the Kings' Inns and the Law Society has (NB: Irish is the 1st official language of the state and where there is a divergence between legislation in the two official languages, Irish takes precedence. I am not saying I agree with this - I am just stating the case. My advice to any intending home schoolers in Ireland is to be aware of the necessity of Irish for certain professions and other opportunities.) But latentcy is not good enough. It is also shameful to see the quality of English throughout Northern Europe. The Dutch language is no more inherently difficult than any other language - but it is hard to learn Dutch. The reason why is your average Dutchman speaks English and German fluently and possibily French and a fourth language too and his view is, why should he speak to you with you bad Dutch when he can deal with you much better in his own language. The Dutch government have begun to make it a requirement for non-EU nationals to learn Dutch as so many of them were getting by in English. Similar situations apply in Scandanavia. With regard to Germany, I have taken to advising students who are studying German to avoid cities like Munich, Frankfurt or Stuttgart and go to small towns and when there to talk to middle aged or older people. This is so that they would not take the opportunity of speaking English when it would do them more good to speak German. It gets easier in Southern Europe, though any of the tourist places in Spain, Portugal and Italy have plenty of English speakers.
I recall a push by the German government to fund the teaching of German in Ireland in the late 1980s. The main argument for learning German was the amount of trade between Ireland and Germany. There are a great many cultural arguments for learning German too. But on economics, I would argue that it makes more business sense to learn Italian and Spanish than French or German, as it is easy to do business with the Germanophone or Francophone worlds through English and more difficult with Spain, Italy or Latin America. Indeed, there is an argument for Portugese given the pontential of the Brazilian market. But I do not believe that educational policy need be dictated by the current needs of IBEC.
Finally, Hazelireland mentioned science which was of a high quality in Ireland. Well, the standard of Maths has fallen considerably and that will not help the sciences (or economics or business). I think that the traditional emphasis on hard sciences such as physics and chemistry has moved to what are perceived to be more practical such as information technology. Now don't get me wrong - I am not saying this is not important, but I do think we should hold on to high standards in maths/physics/chemistry. Regarding information technology, though, I know some people who made the jump from Latin to computers and found one a good preparation for the other. I found men who took physics, applied maths and maths at higher level would often prefer Latin to a modern continental language to fulfil their NUI third language requirement. Probably something to do with the logical grammar stuctures within the Latin language.
But education - linguistic, scientific or cultural - always needs to be watched over.