Na mílte ag siúl ar son na Gaeilge

The people of Cork will be given their opportunity to debate the ongoing attacks on the Irish language and the Gaeltacht at a public meeting being held on Monday 3rd February in The Clarion Hotel, Lapps Quay The meeting will commence at 7.30pm

The public meeting is being organized as part of a new language rights campaign that has been established in response to the crisis created by announcement of the Language Commissioner, Seán Ó Cuirreáin, that he would be stepping down from his position as a result of the lack of engagement he has received from the Government.

The meeting is being coordinated by Gael-Taca based on a series of demands which arose at a public meeting held in Liberty Hall, Dublin, on the 11th of January. Over 200 people attended that meeting where it was agreed that an all Ireland campaign be organized to ensure language rights for Irish speakers.

Donnchadh ó hAodh, President of Conradh na Gaeilge will be the keynote speaker at the public meeting and the meeting will be chaired by Gael-Taca.

The meeting is open to everyone in the community and it will provide the opportunity to focus on the actions needed to fight fairness for the Irish speaking and Gaeltacht community.

Helena Ní Dheá
Oifigeach Forbartha
Gael-Taca,
22 Port Uí Shúilleabháin,
Corcaigh.

www.gael-taca.com
(021)4310841

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Reviving the Strategy

January 28, 2014

Opposition spokespeople made recommendations on how to revive the 20 Years Strategy for the Irish language last week at an Oireachtas Sub-Committee meeting, but will these recommendations be taken on board?

At a meeting of the Oireachtas ‘Sub-Committee on the 20 Year Strategy for the Irish language and Related Matters’ the anger and frustration displayed by members of the committee was palpable. With Language Commissioner, Seán Ó Cuirreáin, giving evidence to the recently established committee for the last time before he resigns from his role on 23 February 2014, members of the committee along with other members of the Oireachtas who attended the meeting expressed their intense dissatisfaction with the current status of the Irish language at State-level.

While representatives of the Government coalition such as Michael McCarthy T.D. (Labour Party, and Chairperson of the Sub-Committee); Kevin Humphries T.D.(Labour Party); and Senator Hildegarde Naughton (Fine Gael) are members of the Sub-Committee, last week’s meeting was attended only by members of the opposition. Peadar Tóibín T.D. claimed the lack of governmental representation was ‘disrespectful’ to the authority of the Commissioner, and was disrespectful to the general Irish speaking community.

Having delivered a speech which was highly critical of the civil service, the support and respect from members of the Sub-Committee for Language Commissioner, Seán Ó Cuirreáin, was evident, and many recommendations were made on ways to tackle the ‘pretence’ referred to by Ó Cuirreáin in his speech. On a recommendation by Seanadóir Trevor Ó Clochartaigh, the committee concurred that significant action was required immediately.

Fianna Fáil T.D., Éamon Ó Cuív, recommended a three pronged approach, and recommended each element be acted upon immediately.

Ó Cuív recommended:

#1. A cross-party report be commissioned detailing the Irish language capability across all sectors of the civil and public services. Ó Cuív recommended this be done in the same manner in which the Public Accounts Commission operate – that each group highlighted in the Commissioner’s report be called before the Sub-Committee, including:

• An Garda Síochána

• Department of Justice and Equality

• Department of Environment, Community and Local Government

• Ordinance Survey Ireland

• Health Service Executive

• Central Bank of Ireland

• National Transport Authority

• University of Limerick

• Ennis Town Council

• Donegal County Council

• Kildare County Council

#2. A performance audit be undertaken on the 20 Year Strategy for the Irish language. The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht launched a progress report in July 2013 where details were given of the staggered yet consistent approach to introducing new policies, however according to Irish language organisations the report detailed many shortcomings in relation to a lack of resources, overly ambitious goals, and procrastination on behalf of the Government.

The Sub-Committee concurred that the damning report by An Coimisinéir Teanga gave a realistic account of the current state-of-play in relation to the Strategy, and it was proposed that the Sub-Committee would address these issues, and perform an audit on all elements of the Strategy.

#3. Heads of Bill for the revised Official Languages Act be published and be put before the Sub-Committee and a report prepared in relation to them. Seán Ó Cuirreáin referred to the ‘vacuum’ whereby a review of the Official Languages Act announced in November 2011 was still unpublished, as another reason for his own resignation. While it has been announced recently by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht that the Heads of the Bill will be published before the summer recess, it has since come to light that the Heads of Bill are yet to be agreed as they have not been put to the Government as yet. It is proposed to publish the results of the public consultation on the Official Languages Act at the same time as the Heads of Bill.

While the recommendations made above by Deputy Ó Cuív were noted by Leas-Cathaoirleach of the Sub-Committee, Labhrás Ó Murchú, Ó Cuiv was reminded that he was not an official member of the committee but that the committee were grateful for his input.

Leas-Cathaoirleach, Ó Murchú, then announced that Minister of State for the Gaeltacht, Dinny McGinley, T.D. would come before the Sub-Committee over the coming weeks, and asked all members to make their recommendations in writing to the Secretary.

Foilsithe ar Gaelport.com

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Cognitive Advantages of Second Language Immersion Education

January 28, 2014

The linguistic and educational success of second language immersion education is now well established (see here). What has been less clear until recently was whether children who attend immersion programs show the same kind of advantages in cognitive skills, such as metalinguistic awareness and executive control, as do children who are early bilinguals. Metalinguistic awareness is our explicit knowledge of different aspects of language (sounds, words, syntax, and so on) and, when needed, our capacity to talk about these properties. It is crucial in the development of literacy, for example. As for executive control (also known as executive function), it is a set of complex cognitive processes that include attention, inhibition, monitoring, selection, planning, and so on. Inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility are three core aspects of executive control.

In a recent study, York University professor Ellen Bialystok and her colleagues Kathleen F. Peets and Sylvain Moreno studied the development of metalinguistic awareness in children becoming bilingual in an immersion education program. They gave different tasks to second and fifth grade English-speaking children in a French immersion program and compared their results with those of children in a regular English program. The tasks involved morphological awareness (adding correct morphological forms to nonsense words), syntactic awareness (making grammaticality judgments), and verbal fluency (generating words that belong to a semantic category or that begin with an initial letter). These three tasks differed in their need for executive control, from the least in the first task to the most in the third task.

The researchers found that the metalinguistic advantages reported in studies of early bilinguals emerged gradually in these immersion children, with tasks requiring less executive control giving positive results sooner than tasks requiring more executive control. Thus all immersion children outperformed their monolingual counterparts in the morphological awareness tasks, even after two years of immersion, and fifth grade immersion program children were more accurate in the syntactic awareness tasks than their monolingual counterparts. The verbal fluency tasks began as a problem for the younger children in the immersion program (literacy instruction in English only starts in third grade) but the older children had regained the ground and performed equivalently to monolingual children. The authors concluded that the advantages previously reported for early bilingual children could already be detected in children learning another language in an immersion program.

What about the advantages in executive control as such that children brought up bilingually show systematically over their monolingual counterparts? Do immersion children also show these advantages? Belgian scientists Anne-Catherine Nicolay and Martine Poncelet examined this. They tested third grade French-speaking children in an English immersion program and compared them to a similar group following a monolingual curriculum. They assessed attentional and executive skills by means of six different tasks such as alerting, auditory selective attention, divided attention, mental flexibility, and so on.

The results they found showed that in four of the six tasks, the immersion children did better than their monolingual counterparts. This is quite remarkable as the children had only had three years of immersion education which involves less intensive exposure to a second language than in early bilingualism. And yet, the immersion experience had already produced some of the cognitive benefits associated with early bilingualism.

The one negative finding that surprised the researchers (i.e. no difference between the two groups) concerned interference inhibition. In the task they used, the flanker task, children were presented with a central arrow pointing to the left or to the right, and flanker arrows above or below pointing in the same direction or in the opposite direction (in this latter case, the flanker arrows create an interference that has to be inhibited in order to answer correctly). Children had to concentrate on the central arrow and press a left button when the central arrow pointed to the left and a right button for the arrow pointing to the right. The authors explained the lack of a difference between the two groups by the fact that young emerging bilinguals in immersion programs (third grade children here) have not yet had much practice at inhibiting interference since they devote less time to second language production in a classroom situation than in real life.

Do children who have had further experience of immersion education show better control of interference inhibition? The answer comes from a paper by Ellen Bialystok and Raluca Barac who also used a flanker task but this time in two different studies with immersion children. In the first, they tested second and third graders who attended school in Hebrew, and in the second, they tested second and fifth graders in a French immersion program. In both studies they found that executive control performance improved with increased experience in a bilingual education environment. Basically, the length of time spent in an immersion program—some of their children had had two more years of immersion than in the Belgian study—determines the extent to which executive control is affected.

So the news is excellent for all those who are putting time and energy in immersion education—teachers and staff, parents and, of course, children. As Ellen Bialystok, Kathleen F. Peets and Sylvain Moreno state so nicely: “The road to bilingualism is incremental, and so are the accrued advantages”.

François Grosjean, Ph.D., is Emeritus Professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland and the author of Bilingual: Life and Reality, among other books.

References

Ellen Bialystok & Raluca Barac (2012). Emerging bilingualism: Dissociating advantages for metalinguistic awareness and executive control. Cognition, 122, 67-73.

Ellen Bialystok, Kathleen F. Peets & Sylvian Moreno (2012). Producing bilinguals through immersion education: Development of metalinguistic awareness. Applied Psycholinguistics, 2012, 1-15, doi:10.1017/S0142716412000288

Anne-Catherine Nicolay & Martine Poncelet (2013). Cognitive advantage in children enrolled in second-language immersion elementary school program for three years. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 16 (3), 597-607, doi:10.1017/S1366728912000375

www.psychologytoday.com

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How did we get the teaching of Irish so wrong?

January 28, 2014

Irish is our official first language.

We spend at least 13 years studying it and yet very few of us would claim to be able to speak it. What is the problem with Irish in our education system? In a chilly hall in Loreto Bray, Co Wicklow, a group of Transition Year students are arguing about whether learning Chinese would be a better option than learning Irish. It’s the usual debate about culture versus practicality. Impressively, at least one girl has experience of both: “I’m learning Chinese and trust me, Irish is way easier.” These girls are taking part in a student outreach roadshow that youth co-ordinator for Conradh na Gaeilge Aodhán Ó Dea has been presenting in various schools during the past three years. The idea is to get students thinking about their attitudes to Irish and to inspire them to use the language outside of school.

“A lot of the time I’d find that students like the idea of the language,” says Ó Dea. “They don’t want to lose it, but often they say they don’t enjoy learning it. In some of the wealthier schools, the level of Irish is good, but the attitude towards it is downright hostile, and on the other hand some schools where standards aren’t great, the students are really receptive and enthusiastic about its importance to our culture.” It’s a thorny subject. Why, with 13 or 14 years of instruction and learning in Irish, does research show standards continue to fall? A 2006 report by Dr John Harris from Trinity College found a sharp fall in the standard of Irish among sixth-class students between 1985 and 2002. It also found a quarter of Irish primary school teachers believed their own standard of Irish to be “weak”.

Last November, the chief inspector’s report said students’ learning was “less than satisfactory in almost a quarter of Irish lessons in primary schools and almost a third of Irish lessons in post-primary schools”. The report was also concerned about language competence of teachers in a “small but significant number of classrooms”. Irish can be successfully taught, the students in Loreto Bray, for example, have a really good level of Irish, but that success is less common than it should be. So how can we improve?

Plans at primary level

At primary level a new integrated language curriculum is due for junior classes this September. It’s not before time. The curriculum in place since 1999 intended to encourage a communicative, task-based approach, but while the document itself is wonderfully child-centred and idealistic, it seems to ignore the fact that for most children, and indeed, teachers, Irish is a second language and needs to be learned rather than absorbed. Another, very simple problem with the old curriculum is that it was only available in Irish. For a busy teacher, this is an added obstacle, even for those with a reasonable proficiency in the language.

“We need an integrated teaching programme of Irish for English-medium schools,” says Deirbhile Nic Craith, education officer with the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO). “Previously, we had the Buntús Cainte which had step-by-step lessons for teachers. In Irish-medium primary schools, they have the Séideán Sí which is excellent but we have nothing like that for English-medium schools. We need a programme that integrates the various curriculum strands so busy teachers aren’t entirely left up to their own devices to plan.” This is an important point. Teachers need the support of a formal structure, an ABC of what to teach, right from oral Irish lessons in infant classes. There needs to be a clear and steady progression through the course. At the moment, there is no structure for teachers to follow. A clear, step-by-step, framework of Irish lesson plans, similar to French or Spanish, would benefit children and teachers who are less confident in their own command of the language.

The new curriculum, which will be introduced to junior classes (up to second class) in September 2014, will give teachers far more support in terms of what to teach and how to teach it. It will include a step-by-step guide about how to achieve particular curricular objectives. The curriculum will be published online to enable teachers to click through to the material and supports. Making an English-language version of the document would certainly help teachers, but some people involved in teacher-training acknowledge that such a move would be met with hostility from Irish language groups.

Pádraig Ó Duibhir of St Patrick’s College Drumcondra, with his colleague Prof Jim Cummins of the University of Toronto, has conducted a review for the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) of strategies proven to work for language learning in the lead up to this upcoming curriculum review. “Part of the issue is the system of 30 or 40 minutes a day for Irish in primary school,” says Ó Duibhir. “That drip drip approach has not been successful for Welsh in Wales or French in Canada. Schools achieving good results here have children using Irish outside the Irish class. One school, for example has had great success with a Lá na Gaeilge where everyone makes an effort to speak Irish on one day each week. The children have a need to use it. In practising it, they experience success, which further motivates them.”

An approach to language learning that takes the language outside of the language class has been successful. In Cordoba in Spain teachers are encouraged to teach one subject apart from English, through English. “PE and art are easy ways into that sort of approach. Science could work too,” Ó Duibhir says. Such an approach assumes a good level of competence from teachers and, as seen in the Harris report, that assumption is not always accurate. “Take teacher-training for second level,” says Anna Ní Ghallachair, director of the Language Centre in NUI Maynooth. “Entrants need a BA or a Masters’ in Irish, but what exactly does that mean in terms of their competence in the language? For primary-school teaching, higher-level Irish is a pre-requisite for entry into college, but again, does that really tell us anything about their language competence?”

One suggestion is for teachers to achieve a minimum level of competency as laid out by the common European Framework of Reference for Languages. This is a guide to describe the achievements of language learners across Europe. It is standardised and allows teachers and students understand what level of skill they have attained. The European certificate of Irish, the Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge (TEG), has been designed within this framework. People taking the TEG can sit a series of six exams that test for proficiency from absolute beginner right through to advanced.

Siuán Ní Mhaonaigh, the director of TEG, says “I firmly believe much of the tinkering being done to syllabi is unnecessary,” she says. “A practical and valid testing system would go a long way towards improving things for Irish. At the moment we are not asking the right questions in our exams.”

Lack of acceptable standards

Indeed, a lack of a recognised acceptable standard is a problem across the board. In first year of secondary school, a maths teacher can assume a certain level of numerical ability among students and can therefore build on that. An Irish teacher on the other hand could be faced with students who have excellent Irish alongside others who have barely a word. They aren’t so much building on a foundation as being forced to start from scratch.

“Standardised tests in Irish have been developed,” Nic Craith says. “If they were used it would give us some idea of what teachers could expect.” Nic Craith agrees that using the common European Framework of Reference for Languages could be a very useful tool, both within schools and in teacher-training. It would be an independent benchmark of a student or a teacher’s true ability and it would give students and teachers something to work towards. Proper assessment can be a motivator in and of itself.

However, by the time students reach second level, for many, a rot has already set in. Those who have a good level of Irish face boredom while the teacher tries to bring other students along, while students who have already experienced eight years of fruitless teaching and learning are more resistant and discouraged than ever. Students who are willing and happy to learn French and Spanish don’t see Irish in the same light. They have already learned it for eight years, they can’t speak it and therefore must be terrible at it.

The Leaving Cert’s two papers and the oral and aural exams can seem like too much work and many students opt for ordinary level as a strategy to allow them to focus on other subjects. The literature, it is argued, is off-putting and distracts from Irish as a language. Conradh na Gaeilge proposes that Irish at Leaving Cert should be subdivided into communicative Irish, which would be compulsory and which would take the oral language, written communication, comprehension and so-on, and an advanced option which would encompass poetry and literature. Others argue this would dumb down the subject with no evidence that the language would experience any boost as a result.

“We need to ask ourselves, are we teaching Irish for cultural reasons, or for it to be used?” says Dr Muiris Ó Laoire, a lecturer and researcher on multi-lingualism in IT Tralee. “If we want it to be used, we need to rethink what we’re doing. How are we going to provide meaningful opportunities for use? It can be done but it is a challenge.” “The teaching and learning of the language can, and does work,” says Ní Ghallachair. But for it to be more successful, we need to acknowledge the effort needed. We need to examine how teachers are trained to teach, how students are taught to learn and how all are motivated to use it. “Irish depends on the commitment of a school and teachers in a way other subjects don’t,” says Ó Duibhir. “But I think our expectations are unrealistic. That’s not to say the way things are is okay, but I do think that when it comes to Irish, perhaps we need to redefine what success is.”

www.irishtimes.com

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