Rethink on teaching foreign languages needed
February 28, 2012
I don’t think the Government should resurrect Enda Kenny’s proposal to downgrade Irish at senior level (Matt Cooper, Feb 24), but it should revisit the counterproductive and asinine decision to scrap continental languages in national schools.
It was heartbreaking to watch the recent news item on RTÉ showing an enthusiastic Italian teacher with her pupils, who were obviously greatly enjoying learning the Italian language and culture — and knowing their course was going to be axed very soon.
As one who was lucky enough to be reared bilingually — in English and French — I can testify to the enormous advantage of learning different languages at a young age. Grammar was taught, but it took a back seat, which meant that it made more sense and was far less boring than grammar taught in the traditional way.
This combination enabled me to learn other languages, including Irish, relatively quickly later in life. I believe children who attend Gaelscoileanna also tend to be more proficient in other languages.
There is no reason why Irish people cannot become proficient in several languages. This would not only be an immense advantage in the hard and competitive economic world — so the initial outlay would soon be recouped — but enable people to fully enjoy other countries’ cultures.
Judy Peddle
Love Lane
Charleville
Co Cork
IRISH EXAMINER
Scrios iomlán á bhagairt ar earnáil dheonach na Gaeilge
February 28, 2012
Mórshiúl i nGaoth Dobhair
February 28, 2012
Cruinnithe Réigiúnacha Poiblí
February 28, 2012
Take away the school, kill the local community
February 27, 2012
Education cutbacks are a death sentence for rural villages, Jerome Reilly finds in Trumera, Co Laois
For Liam O’Neill there can be no surrender. He believes the battle to save the country’s primary schools and their teachers is part of a larger conflict — a fight for the survival of rural Ireland.
The school principal at Scoil Naisiunta Thromaire, a small Irish-speaking national school in Trumera in rural Co Laois just a few miles outside Mountrath, is also the incoming GAA president.
He believes the education cutbacks contained in the Budget austerity plan, which will increase the number of pupils needed for the retention of teachers, is tantamount to a death sentence for many small parish communities.
And, despite last week’s slight softening of the planned cuts by Education Minister Ruairi Quinn following howls of protest in every constituency, Mr O’Neill is convinced that it is those who live in the country who are paying the heaviest price since the downturn hit. The fear now is that, over the next three years, schools will be under pressure to keep their teachers each September.
Minister Quinn has come under immense pressure from rural members of his own party, including a number of senators, and Fianna Fail Education spokesman Brendan Smith said the minister was trying to give the impression that he had rowed back on cuts at small schools when he had not.
“Essentially, the Government has announced that small schools facing cuts can appeal these cuts if they can prove their pupil number will rise significantly over the coming years. This is nothing more than an attempt to take the heat out of the anger about this unpopular Budget measure,” he said.
For Liam O’Neill the question is not about economics. “Small communities like ours are anchored by their national schools. Take away the school from a place like Trumera and the community no longer exists. The GAA club would inevitably fold as well,” he said.
His roots in the school run deep. His father was also headmaster, and his mother’s aunt was school mistress before that. His family have given the school more than 100 years of service. He looks at what happened to the nearby hamlet of Kilbricken, which was once a hive of activity.
Kilbricken station, on the Dublin to Cork line, opened in 1848 but closed for goods traffic in 1975, and finally closed altogether in 1976. The Kilbricken Inn, which also served as a shop and post office, is now shuttered and the national school, a fine building with old-fashioned stone outhouses, is deserted and derelict.
The words of Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village come to Mr O’Neill — a poem he has taught to a few generations of youngsters in Trumera.
But times are altered; trade’s unfeeling train
Usurp the land and dispossess the swain.
“The numbers in any national school will fluctuate. The fact of the matter is this community suffered a hit in the Seventies. There were three national schools in the parish but two of them are now closed,” he said.
“We now look out across the green fields and see the traffic of the country passing us on the N7. We have the noise pollution from that. We know it represents progress of a sort, but has life improved for this community with the closing of Clonard school, Kilbricken school, the post office, the pub and the train station?”
Learning support teacher Laura Martin and her colleague Fiona Boyle take the youngsters through their lessons. At playtime the children converge in the school playground with their hurls and helmets — a beacon of life during the day, when most parents work away from the parish. Only two families in the 2012 roll call at the school are full-time farmers.
Labour Senator John Whelan has led the charge against the cutbacks in rural national schools. “My serious concern is that this was viewed as purely a teacher numbers issue by Minister Quinn and his officials. It has to be viewed in a broader context,” he said.
“As originally envisaged, it would have had a devastating impact on the sustainability of life in rural ireland. Schools are integral to the viability of communities, especially in the context of increased emigration, increased unemployment and the loss of Garda stations, post offices and a raft of other community hubs. It can’t be all about book balancing. We have to look at the social consequences. If we lose schools in September this year, the following year or the year after, it will lead to rural depopulation and rural dereliction. We won’t just have ghost estates, we will have ghost villages.”
Despite the apparent U-turn on the issue, it now looks as though some parts of the country will still be devastated, especially in the West.
In Galway East — a constituency that hasn’t returned a senior minister in living memory — eight schools are affected. Roscommon-South Leitrim also has eight schools facing teacher cutbacks; Longford-Westmeath has six schools under threat; and Donegal South West, five.
Labour Senator John Kelly from Roscommon told the Sunday Independent he was deeply concerned that from a per head of population perspective, “Roscommon seems to have got the greatest hit, with eight schools under threat of losing a teacher.”
He added: “I am not happy about that. I believe that by purely assessing the savings involved we forget the social and economic benefits small schools are to rural areas. I am years campaigning for fair play for rural Ireland and I will continue to push the Minister for Education to give a degree of leniency to schools that may lose a teacher over one or two pupils.”
Senator James Heffernan is also unconvinced that the threat to rural schools has receded. “Although the minister has said that there is an effective appeal procedure in place, I believe that the changes this year are the thin end of the wedge. As a former teacher, it is my view that the changes next year and the year after will have the potential to be devastating for rural life in Ireland. Should schools lose teachers and be forced to close down, it would be the last straw for life in rural Ireland,” the senator said.
“In Co Limerick there are around 60 schools with four or fewer teachers. These schools are the heart of their communities. If they were to be lost, it would be a major societal blow for those communities and parishes and indeed to the future of organisations like the GAA which is organised on parish lines.”
Meanwhile, Enda Kenny’s political heartland of Mayo which is the third largest county, but only 15th in terms of population, has just four schools affected.
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT
Sicíní Scoil Aonghusa
February 27, 2012
Seachain! – An invitation
February 24, 2012
Our language strategy is leaving us at a loss for the right words
February 24, 2012
THE invoice for my eldest daughter’s summer trip to the Gaeltacht arrived the other day. It is for a sizeable amount, sufficiently large to make me to gulp and wonder if this is a good investment of money, for that and a number of other reasons.
It is for a sizeable amount, sufficiently large to make me to gulp and wonder if this is a good investment of money, for that and a number of other reasons.
Firstly, here are the reasons why I’ll most probably sign the required cheque (other than being told by my wife to shut up and get on with it). My daughter’s Irish language capabilities were improved greatly by the experience last year on her visit to the Gaeltacht. She had just finished primary school and was heading into secondary school.
Her Irish proficiency was sufficient, but probably just about. Immersion, even if only for a three-week period, was extremely beneficial and has helped enormously in her first year in secondary school, allowing her to work during Irish class comfortably alongside those children who had completed their primary education as gaelige.
Secondly, the exposure to the Gaeltacht culture has to be good for a city girl, as well as the meeting with people from other parts of the country who have different experiences of growing up to her own. The part of Galway where she went, deep in the Gaeltacht, about an hour’s drive from Galway City, is remote and beautiful and, to a city girl, must be challenging. In addition to that the discipline that is imposed, beyond the insistence that only Irish is spoken, is reassuring to any parent. (And yes, I’m not naive enough to believe that the boys and girls do not show interest in each other, but they do that anyway 52 weeks in a year and this is part of growing up, isn’t it?).
The third and important reason why I like the idea of going to the Gaeltacht is that it gives her an opportunity that I didn’t get to learn more about her native culture and to develop her language as part of that. I wasn’t allowed as a sixth-class student to go for the month of August to Cape Clear off West Cork with my friends because I failed the entrance exam: it was deemed that I would struggle to hold a conversation and would be unable to refrain from speaking English. I thought that was the point — that it would force me to learn — but couldn’t argue it well enough in Irish. It is true that I have struggled always with spoken Irish since, doing somewhat better with written Irish during exams, but that rejection may have contributed to my decision to give less priority to Irish for study and exams during secondary school, making it my one pass level subject for the Leaving Cert. (Poor teaching and a dodgy syllabus probably played their parts too). However, I would like my children to have a more positive experience of the Irish language than I did and more opportunity to embrace it, if that’s what they want.
So why my doubts about this year’s Gaeltacht visit, other than the cost? Well the fourth reason why I’ll sign the cheque actually is linked exactly to those doubts. If I want my daughter’s education to progress, so as to give her a good chance of making her own way in life as an adult, I want her to achieve good exam results. There are many other measurements of how a life can progress, and happiness be achieved, but all rational evidence suggests that educational attainment improves the chances of things working out well and the effort put into achieving that is very important as well to all aspects of life. As Irish is compulsory for the Leaving Cert I want her to be able to do as well as possible, even if my extremely limited proficiency did not necessarily harm my career progression.
But what of other languages, foreign languages that might help to assist her work opportunities in the future, especially if she has to go abroad as an adult to get work? Am I restricting her by placing such an emphasis on Irish instead of asking her to concentrate on a foreign language with similar emphasis? Is it her time well spent? Is this a fault of the Irish educational system, that we spend too much time on Irish at both primary and secondary level, to the exclusion of early immersion in other languages, or sufficient development of those languages at second level?
This came to mind earlier this week with the announcement of the creation of about 1,000 jobs at PayPal in Dundalk. The company will be looking for some foreign language proficiency among many of its employees, particularly those in so-called “customer service” roles. I suspect that many of these people will have to be imported because native Irish people will not have the sufficient language skills to be able to deal with foreign customers.
That would not be the case in many other countries where they learn a range of foreign languages and from an early age. It is noticeable, for example, how people from Scandinavian countries tend to be as fluent in English as they are in their own languages. This is often put down to learning English from a very early age. Why do we wait until children are already in secondary school to start learning other languages? The easy blame goes to the time devoted instead to Irish (and yet with such poor results, given the standards of proficiency, limited use, and sometimes levels of hostility shown towards the language).
In a strange way, however, our problem may not be Irish, but English. We are lucky that we converse in the international language of trade, that we share a common first spoken language with Britain and the US, Australia and Canada. Other countries tend to learn how to speak English so that they can improve their business and work opportunities. This may make us lazy. What’s the need to speak German or Spanish for example, when anyone we want to deal with from there probably speaks English too? If we learn a bit of French it seems that it’s merely to make things a bit easier when we go there on holidays.
MY daughter is learning German at secondary school. She is one of a small number of children in her year to be doing so. I asked her if she would choose German as her subject for a number of reasons, but mainly to do with future employability. Germany is a country undergoing major demographic shifts which means that it is starting to face labour shortages. There are going to be major job opportunities in the future for those who have the German language as well as educational qualifications. And given that Germany is the powerhouse of the EU to which we are bound there is no harm in adding to her options by giving her the chance to learn the language.
Some people have said to me that German is too hard a language to learn, but what foreign language isn’t if you are coming to it late, as happens in our educational system? Others have told me that I need to look further east. Well no matter how hard German is I suspect that it is it is going to come more naturally than learning Mandarin. I’m not convinced yet that the idea that our children should all be learning Chinese is appropriate. When it comes to language we need to walk before we try to run.
So my suggestion: Irish remains a language that is compulsory in primary school and up to Junior Cert. It becomes optional for the Leaving Cert cycle then, as I believe Fine Gael wanted but didn’t put into the programme for government. In return, we must introduce a foreign language, preferably German, as an additional subject for the primary cycle, with teachers being promised that there will be no further cuts in their number or their pay and conditions as compensation for its introduction. It means investment but wouldn’t it be worth it? Let’s at least have a reasoned and practical debate about our language strategy please.
IRISH EXAMINER
Scléip Winners – Munster heat
February 24, 2012
We had a great day out at the Munster heat of Scléip in the Firkin Crane theatre in Cork on the 22nd February. There were 6 schools with us on the day and all of the participants are due praise, the standard was very very high this year and the judges had difficult decisions to make. Below is the list of winners, who will go on to compete in the competiton final:
Modern music (solo):
- Sinéad Toomey, Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh (junior)
- Maitias Barker, Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne (senior)
Modern music (group):
- Na JJs, Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh (junior)
- Na Comrádaithe, Gaelcholáiste Mhuire A.G (senior)
Creative dance (solo):
- Shauna Ní Thuama, Gaelcholáiste Mhuire A.G (junior)
- Áine Ni Loingsigh, Coláiste an Phiarsaigh (senior)
Creative dance (group):
- Húla Húpz! Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh (junior)
- Triail a hAon! Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh (senior)
Drama/mime (solo and group):
- Anna & Nicole, Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne (junior)
- Aisteoirí na Ríochta, Gaelcholáiste Chiarraí (senior)
Miscellaneous (solo and group):
- Dílseacht Gheal, Gaelcholáiste Chiarraí (junior)
- Léiriú Gaelach den amhrán Addicted to Progress ó na Coronas, Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne (senior)
Judges’ Choice:
- Na Rithimí! Gaelcholáiste Luimnigh (senior)
Congratulations to everyone who took part, we hope you really enjoyed the day and we look forward to seeing you again in the Axis on March 24th for the competition final.
Programme announced for Litríocht na nÓg literature conference
February 23, 2012
Publisher Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin has been announced as one of the keynote speakers for the forthcoming Litríocht na nÓg conference.
A comprehensive programme of events and lectures has been organised for the two-day conference which will take place in St Patrick’s College Dromcondra on March 23 and 24.
The latest trends in childrens literature and publishing will be discussed with Friday’s events focusing on pre-schoolers and toddlers.
Diversity within young people’s literature from mythology to modern day technology will also up for discussion among Órla Ní Chuilleanáin, Iarla Mac Aodha Bhuí agus ag Meadhbh Ní Eadhra.
Following on from this discussion, Mac Dhonnagáin will speak on the challenge of children’s publishing in the Irish language on a ideological and entrepreneurial basis.
Saturday’s proceedings will start of with a literary breakfast organized by Comhar which will feature Laoise Ní Chléirigh, Seán Ó Dubhchon, Órla Ní Chuilleanáin agus Ríona Nic Congáil
A lively discussion on aspects of youth culture, poetry and literature will be discussed on Saturday with Áine Ní Ghlinn, Claire Marie Dunne and Colm Mac Séalaigh.
Eilís Ní Dhuibhne and Andrew Whitson will close the conference with keynote speeches with Whitson set to discuss the role of illustratation in the digital age.
