The Wee Ginger Dug does Gaelic
I could hardly believe my eyes when I read the Wee Ginger Dug's column in The National on Thursday: a positive article about Gaelic. How astonishing!
About how it's not a dead language, but an active part of Scottish culture and a big part of our heritage, with Gaelic Medium (immersion) teaching going from 15 pupils in 1985 to over 4,000 in 2018. Imagine a Scottish journalist putting it in writing in a Scottish newspaper that Gaelic Medium education is a success, instead of coming to the conclusion that Gaelic is some sort of conspiracy to turn us all into Gaelic-speaking EssEnPee clones.
The Dug even pointed out that the success of Gaelic should not be - but is - constantly referred to in the same breath as the decline in foreign language learning in Scottish schools. Gaelic is a native language. French, German, Spanish, etc are foreign languages. The two types of education are not in competition. Gaelic even comes from a different part of the Scottish budget from foreign languages, and depriving Gaelic Medium education of funding will not put an extra penny into foreign language teaching or encourage a single young person to learn a foreign language.
What happened to modern foreign languages in Scottish schools? And I'm not talking about since 2010 when the EssEnPee became the Scottish Government - nor has it got anything to do with Curriculum for Excellence, whatever the press may tell us - but there's been a decline going back 30 years or more.
There's always been a bit of inverse snobbery in some Scottish secondary schools: a friend (a scientist) once told me he always knew when he was in a modern languages class because the kids all wore blazers. One secondary head told me the trouble with modern languages was 'the kids don't like it.' Emboldened by the fact that I was due to retire, I asked if that was how secondary timetablers usually designed the curriculum. He looked affronted. But I did bring it to his attention that his school was heavy in maths, English, science, PE and business studies but very light in history, geography, R&ME and languages - and poor home economics and techie just didn't get a look-in. This to me looked like a weighting towards what I can only call 'learning-light subjects.' You know, cutting out the ones where you have to learn actual skills and absorb ideas, rather than swallowing information and spewing it back on an exam paper. (Sorry - maybe too much information there!) Could that suggest poverty of ambition in some schools? Or an approach to education that consists of teaching the utilitarian, rather than what's important. It might explain why Scotland no longer occupies the place it once did in the league tables.
What will get young people learning foreign languages? Whether the UK leaves the EU or stays in, young people are going to need to be able to communicate in other languages. Yes, in some places in Scotland they can learn Chinese (at hubs subsidised by the Chinese Government). And (some) universities are now pretty good at offering languages courses for total beginners. (Others have just scrapped languages altogether).
My niece teaches Spanish at Glasgow University to medical students among others who are planning to go and work for a few months in Central or South America. And that brings me to the Wee Ginger Dug's most important idea: my niece's Spanish 'methodology' is total immersion. That's how she taught English back in Chile. Total immersion is how she's bringing up her own children. It seems to work, although her older boy is now worried that his Mama speaks so much Spanish because her English is kinda ropey. Students come out of her university classes ready to go - and absolutely motivated to know more. Gaelic Medium education also works on the basis of total immersion.
Foreign languages in Scottish schools don't work that way: foreign languages are taught through English. Learners, as the Wee Ginger Dug points out, do not achieve fluency that way.
Years ago there were a few attempts to teach French and German through immersion in a couple of primary schools. But it was heavy on staff and it was hard to replace teachers when they moved on - as they did, because they were often very good and got promotion no bother.
25 years ago, in Scotland, we had the brilliant idea of starting languages in primary school but we used volunteer teachers, and after a longish time, some teachers just un-volunteered: their training stopped at 27 days and they couldn't get recognition for the training they had done. (Certainly not in the form of promotion). The local authority where I live had the brilliant idea of introducing French from primary one upwards, just bringing it in to lessons in a 'natural' way. But, cynic that I am, I soon sussed this would allow schools to meet a target for hours of language teaching, so they could let secondary pupils chuck language learning at the end of S2.
I have to say that the ebb and flow of modern languages in Scotland is cyclical: we've been going through experiments for 50 years (anybody remember Bonjour Line?) and are no nearer making sense of what we're trying to do. I don't in fact think this is a school problem at all, but has to do with UK society's utterly bizarre attitude to other people 's languages: 'they all speak English' has been the cry for generations now. 'Naw, they don't' is the only sensible answer to that one.
Only the UK and the USA have this insistence on being monolingual.
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