. It also depends on the ethos of the school as well, i.e. what attitude the staff have towards the language and whether or not they actually speak Irish to each other in the school; as this helps to improve their Irish- especially those who do not have Irish. But even when this occurs, it is notoriously difficult to get the students to actually communicate Irish with each other in the yard. A connected factor is whether or not the Gaelscoil is a stand alone school or if it is just a stream within a much larger English-medium school- as creating the necessary ethos for cultivating Irish and creating a community of speakers is extremely difficult since teachers cannot exclusively use Irish with each other, since not all teachers teach as part of the Gaelscoil. But worse still is the fact, its nye on impossible to get the students to talk to each other in Irish because they are also surrounded by students who cannot converse in Irish.

It also depends on whether or not the student had the chance to complete his/ her entire primary and secondary education through the medium of Irish.

Students who just attend primary Irish-medium primary schools and go on to an English speaking school will not become competent Irish speaker later in life, because if you don not use a language you gradually loose it.

Whatever about producing Irish speakers, I don't think they produce speakers that have grasped Irish idiom or pronunciation- hence, Gaelscoilis and Urban Irish.







, I feel your pain, people don't seem to get that language learning is a gradual process, two weeks in a Gaeltacht doesn't cut it. That's why school ethos is so important, if the medium of communication in the staffroom is exclusively Irish- as an unspoken rule, obviously- teachers are required to actually learn and improve their Irish if they are going to communicate.

The standard of Irish among primary school teachers is definitely deteriorating (in general); especially, if you look at the official reports:

Inspectorate, Evaluations Support and Research Unit. (2007). Irish in Primary School, Inspectorate Evaluation Studies. Department of Education and Science. Available at; http://www.education.ie/en/Publications ... 08_pdf.pdf (esp. section 2.5 and 2.6)

and

Harris J et al. (2006). Irish in Primary Schools, Long-Term National Trends in Achievement. Available at; http://www.gaelscoileanna.ie/assets/Iri ... chools.pdf (esp. the conclusion- this report is particularly effective for comparing Irish-medium school with Gaeltacht schools)

Cian

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

I would add that many of the suggestions here were implemented in many, many schools not long after partition in 1922, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, with little success in terms of stemming the decline of the Gaeltacht. There were over 400 Irish-medium schools at one point, including many at the secondary level. What the system succeeded in doing was providing a knowledge of Irish to an entire post-partition generation, which was an achievement in itself, but few achieved fluency and even fewer passed the language on to their own children.

Now we learn that most Gaeltacht youth are less confident in Irish. English isn't just cool, it's the language they are most confident speaking. Universal bilingualism among native Irish speakers is here to stay, which usually means unidirectional bilingualism in favour of English across social domains, so how much room for growth is there?

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Is foghlaimeoir mé. Is fearr liom Gaeilge Chonnacht. Corrections always appreciated.

I think Gaelscoileanna generally have a policy of having a maximum of two classes per year as more than that dilutes the teachers' control over ensuring that Irish is spoken. They also have separate yards for the infants as they do not yet have enough Irish to communicate exclusively in the language (most are starting school with little or no Irish). The teachers speak exclusively Irish all of the time to each other and the children.

As was mentioned earlier, all of this comes from the ethos of the school created by the principal. Parents are told from the day they enrol their children that if they have any word at all of Irish to use it when on the school premises to demonstrate to the children that Irish is the language of this piece of ground. Most parents greet each other with 'Dia duit' even if that's as far as they go. There are also very basic Irish classes put on for new parents which many avail of.

This particular school has a relatively young staff with very few having children, yet anyway. What would be very telling is if they would rear their own children through Irish

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Actually, there's a better reason for teaching reading and writing of English: to help them learn Irish.

One of my bugbears in the Scottish Gaelic-medium stream over here is the insistence of teaching "initial literacy" (ie first experience of reading and writing) in Gaelic to kids who are not yet comfortable in the language. When I was doing my language degree, we had a unit on bilingual education, and educationalists all agree that mother tongue initial literacy is the best thing for kids, both in terms of general attainment and in terms of their ability in the new target language.

When you're learning to read, you use your understanding and intuitions of the language to fill in gaps in your understanding of the words on the page, and if you're not fluent in the language you're learning to read in, you don't have those intuitions. What you do have is intuitions based on your native language. It has been observed in many parts of the world, in many languages, that kids who are taught to read and write first in a foreign language make more grammatical errors and borrow more structures from their own language than kids who are taught to read and write in their own languages while being taught the new language orally only, and then taught to read and write in the new language two or three years later.

Of course, no-one ever believes me when I say this. Gaelic, apparently, is different. Which is funny, because Hawai'ians say Hawai'ian is different. And people from Ireland... [etc]

The objections I get are based on two fears: using English in the school promotes the status of English; and there is so little Gaelic/Hawai'ian/whatever outside the classroom that any second where you're not using the language in the classroom is an unrecoverable loss.

The data already exists to tell us that these concerns are unfounded, but this is now unshakeable dogma in language revitalisation, and people who want to save their language end up doing as much harm as good. Which is a shame.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

I cannot find it now, but COGG had research which showed that if you learned to read in your second language first; the skills transferred better than the other way around. Having said that, we are probably only talking about the initial decoding skills. Gaelscoileanna introduce English in the middle of the second year of school i.e. age six. I totally agree about filling in the gaps, of course when reading.

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That's only a particularly good thing if your goal is written ability in the native language. If your goal is the revitalisation of a language, you're really looking to get accurate and fluent spoken ability in the minority language.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

Ideally, we can have both!

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This is typical Fine Gael policy. They don't care how this will affect Gaeltacht schools.

http://connemarajournal.ie/o-cuiv-schoo ... er-threat/

That's it in a nutshell. "They don't care." They won't be in government for too much longer so we'll have to see what we get then. (Is that too political for ILF? )

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None of the major parties really care about Irish. Not one of them has a bilingual party website, for example. Even Sinn Féin, whose members often like to portray themselves as defenders of Irish, have a tokenistic approach to Ireland's oldest official language. Aside from menu headers and a handful of press releases, all the content on their official party website is in English only. Very few people take the language seriously, it seems.

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Is foghlaimeoir mé. Is fearr liom Gaeilge Chonnacht. Corrections always appreciated.