Engaging with Linguistic Diversity

A Study of Educational Inclusion in an Irish Primary School

David Little, Déirdre Kirwan

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350072152
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Inclusive Education

Engaging with Linguistic Diversity describes an innovative and highly successful approach to inclusive plurilingual education at primary level. The approach was developed by Scoil Bhríde (Cailíní), Blanchardstown, as a way of converting extreme linguistic diversity – more than 50 home languages in a school of 320 pupils – into educational capital. The central feature of the approach is the inclusion of home languages in classroom communication.
After describing the national context, the book traces the development of Scoil Bhríde's approach and explores in detail its impact on classroom discourse, pupils' plurilingual literacy development, and their capacity for autonomous learning. The authors illustrate their arguments with a wealth of practical evidence drawn from a variety of sources; pupils' and teachers' voices are especially prominent. The concluding chapter considers issues of sustainability and replication and the implications of the approach for teacher education.
The book refers to a wide range of relevant research findings and theories, including translanguaging, plurilingual and intercultural education, language awareness and language learner autonomy. It is essential reading for researchers and policy-makers in the field of linguistically inclusive education.

1

The National Context

This chapter describes recent patterns of immigration to Ireland, summarizes national language and language education policy, explains the official response to the arrival of linguistic diversity in the education system and the role assigned to Integrate Ireland Language and Training (IILT), and briefly considers developments since the demise of IILT in 2008.

Immigration to Ireland since the 1990s

Ireland has experienced large-scale immigration only in the past quarter century; between the 1840s and the 1990s it was predominantly a country of emigration, though small numbers of Vietnamese refugees were received at the end of the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, similarly small numbers of refugees from the Balkan Wars were admitted under the terms of agreements between the Irish government and the UNHCR; then, towards the end of the decade, there was a rapid increase in the number of asylum seekers, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe; migrant workers from non-EU countries were recruited to fill gaps in the labour force; and large numbers of immigrants came from Eastern European and Baltic states when they joined the European Union in 2004. In the forty years from 1956 to 1996 Ireland’s population increased by 25 per cent, from 2.9 to 3.6 million; in the twenty years from 1996 to 2016 it increased by 31 per cent, from 3.6 to 4.8 million (Central Statistics Office 2017: 6). In 2016, 17.3 per cent of Irish residents (0.8 million) had been born outside Ireland (Central Statistics Office 2017: 46).

Between 1996 and 2006 net migration (numbers immigrating less numbers emigrating) exceeded natural population increase (number of births less number of deaths), and despite the financial crash of 2008 and the ensuing economic crisis, immigration continued to exceed emigration between 2006 and 2011. Over those five years, for example, the number of Polish residents increased from 73,402 to 112,259, the number of Lithuanian residents from 25,796 to 36,683, and the number of Latvian residents from 14,186 to 19,993 (Central Statistics Office 2017: 52). Although there was slightly more emigration than immigration between 2011 and 2016, the number of foreign-born residents continued to increase. In 2016, the distribution of the foreign-born population by nationality was as follows: Polish 2.7 per cent, United Kingdom 2.2 per cent, Lithuanian 0.8 per cent, Romanian 0.6 per cent, Latvian 0.4 per cent, Brazilian 0.3 per cent and others 4.6 per cent (Central Statistics Office 2017: 50). This last category conceals significant diversity: in the year to April 2016, non-Irish immigrants arrived in Ireland from 180 countries (Central Statistics Office 2017: 47).

The 2011 census was the first to ask questions about foreign languages spoken at home and how well those who spoke a foreign language at home could speak English (Central Statistics Office 2017: 54). In the 2016 census, 12.9 per cent of Irish residents reported that they spoke a foreign language at home. The question they were asked was: ‘Do you speak a language other than English or Irish at home?’, and the absence of a follow-up question to establish whether that other language was the dominant medium of domestic communication makes it difficult to interpret this result with confidence. It comes as a surprise, for example, that French was the second most frequently reported foreign language spoken at home (after Polish), though the fact that 75.1 per cent of those who said they spoke French at home were Irish nationals (Central Statistics Office 2017) suggests that perhaps not all of them lived their family life exclusively or predominantly through French.

Despite this uncertainty, the 2016 census returns show that in two decades Irish society has assumed a degree of linguistic diversity that is historically unprecedented and likely to pose a challenge to the education system. Some indication of the extent of that challenge is provided by the fact that of those who spoke a foreign language at home, 19,743 were preschool children (3–4 years), 54,693 were attending primary school and 31,078 were attending secondary school (Central Statistics Office 2017: 54). Further evidence of the educational challenge is the fact that 1,710 of the preschool children who spoke a foreign language at home could not speak English at all, while 5,989 could not speak English well (Central Statistics Office 2017: 56). In other words, some 30 per cent of children who spoke a foreign language at home would have their first immersive encounter with English when starting primary school. It is worth adding that when children whose early life has been lived predominantly through another language are deemed to speak English ‘well’ or ‘very well’, English will nevertheless be a much smaller part of their experience than it is for children born into English-speaking families, and the language may well be a challenge for them when they start school.

Ireland’s immigrant population is not spread evenly across the country. It has been policy to disperse refugees and asylum seekers – now a small percentage of the immigrant population – to centres around the country, but all immigrants with the right to work tend to live in areas where they can find a job and housing is affordable. Many immigrants from the Philippines and India, for example, work in the health sector, which means that their children are likely to be enrolled in schools adjacent to hospitals; while schools situated close to meat-packing plants often enrol Portuguese-speaking children whose parents have come from Brazil. Some schools have many pupils from immigrant families, some have only a few and some have none at all. The extent of linguistic diversity that such pupils bring with them is also highly variable: a school with (say) twenty immigrant pupils may find that between them those pupils have the same number of home languages, whereas a school with a much larger number of immigrant pupils may effectively be dealing with two or three linguistic minorities. Six months after the 2004 enlargement of the EU, the Diocesan Advisors for Religious Education in Primary Schools carried out a survey of schools in Dublin’s western suburbs. They found that the population of non-native speakers of English had risen to almost 50 per cent in some schools and also that some schools had as many as thirty-two different nationalities on the roll (Diocesan Advisers for Religious Education in Primary Schools 2004). The school at the centre of this study is Scoil Bhríde (Cailíní) (St Brigid’s School for Girls), Blanchardstown, Dublin. The classroom data presented and analysed later in the book was mostly collected between 2011 and 2015. By the end of this period about 80 per cent of the pupils came from immigrant families, and they brought some fifty home languages with them. These figures make the school unusual but by no means unique.

Over the past twenty years there has been much debate about what to call pupils from non-indigenous backgrounds. To begin with, ‘international’ and ‘newcomer’ were the preferred terms, but they were clearly inappropriate to children born in Ireland to immigrant parents. For several years those receiving English language support were sometimes referred to as learners of English as a Second Language (ESL), though officialdom has adopted the term English as an Additional Language (EAL). In the present work, we refer to the pupils in focus as coming from immigrant homes or families because their parents were born outside Ireland and as English Language Learners (ELLs) because the fact that they speak a language other than English or Irish at home entitles them to a period of specially funded English language support.

Language policy in Ireland

Language policy in Ireland is rooted in the nineteenth-century ideology that associates nationhood with language. Article 8 of the Constitution of Ireland (1937) declares that ‘Irish as the national language is the first official language’, while it recognizes English as ‘a second official language’. According to Scollon (2004: 272), ‘it has been essential for the modern state to be perceived as having political boundaries that are isomorphic with language boundaries’. Ireland, however, is an exception to this general rule: Irish has been in steady decline since the 1840s. Small Irish-speaking communities have survived, mostly in rural areas on or close to the western and south-western seaboard, but the great majority of the native population is English-speaking and there are no adult monolingual Irish speakers.

In view of Ireland’s colonial past it was perhaps inevitable that the founders of the state would give Irish the legal status of first official language. Although the language plays no role in the daily lives of the great majority of the adult population, all official documents are issued in Irish as well as English, and official and public notices are obligatorily bilingual. Government commitment to the preservation of Irish in public life is confirmed by the Official Languages Act, passed in 2003 to improve the provision of public services through Irish, and the appointment the following year of an Irish Language Commissioner. These and similar measures imply an ambition to restore the language to widespread use in Irish society. The education system is chief among the mechanisms (Shohamy 2006) charged with this task: Irish is an obligatory subject from the beginning of primary to the end of post-primary schooling, and Irish-medium schooling is available at primary and post-primary levels. In 2016/2017 there were 271 Irish-medium primary schools, 145 of them outside and 126 inside Gaeltachtaí (Irish-speaking areas), and 66 Irish-medium post-primary schools, 44 outside and 22 inside Gaeltachtaí. As a language through which citizens live their daily lives, however, Irish continues to decline. According to the 2016 census, only 32 per cent of Irish speakers living in Gaeltachtaí said that they spoke Irish daily outside the school system (Central Statistics Office 2017: 69).

The 2016 census asked two questions about the Irish language: ‘Can you speak Irish?’ and ‘If “Yes,” do you speak Irish: 1. Daily, within the education system, 2. Daily, outside the education system, 3. Weekly, 4. Less often, 5. Never?’ The total number of people who said they could speak Irish was 1.76 million or 39.8 per cent of respondents, compared with 41.4 per cent in 2011 (Central Statistics Office 2017: 66). It is reasonable to assume that a significant proportion of those respondents were school-going children and adolescents; yet 30 per cent of respondents aged between 10 and 19 said they could not speak Irish (Central Statistics Office 2017). As regards frequency of use, 73,803 respondents said they spoke Irish daily outside the education system (3,382 fewer than in 2011), 111,473 said they spoke it weekly, and 586,535 said they spoke it less often. Twenty-four per cent of those who said they could speak Irish also said they never used the language, while 33 per cent of respondents aged 17 and 18 said they could not speak Irish (Central Statistics Office 2017), though the majority of them would have been taught Irish at school for at least thirteen years. These responses suggest that ‘speak Irish’ may have been interpreted in at least two ways: ‘can conduct a (simple) conversation in Irish’ and ‘have learnt Irish and can produce bits of the language when prompted’.

The perceived lack of communication between the anglophone and francophone communities in Canada has sometimes caused them to be described as living in ‘two solitudes’ (see, e.g. Cummins 2008; the phrase comes from the title of a novel by Hugh MacLennan first published in 1945). Although there is no comparable lack of communication between the Irish-speaking minority and the English-speaking majority in Ireland, their languages certainly coexist in two solitudes. This is reflected in the absence of bilingual education. Schools are either English-medium or Irish-medium, and it is a matter of economic necessity rather than educational policy that Irish-medium schools are often obliged to use textbooks written in English to support teaching through Irish. This helps to explain why Ireland has not been significantly involved in the debates surrounding bilingual education in its various forms over the past half century (for a summary, see Sierens and Van Avermaet 2014). Because English and Irish are strictly separated and Irish speakers are a small minority, adult residents who live at a distance from Gaeltachtaí easily forget that they are in an officially bilingual country, and those whose schooling makes them fluent in Irish find it difficult to retain their fluency in later life unless they become teachers of Irish or members of Irish-language associations.

Certainly, English is the language that adult immigrants must learn if they are to establish themselves as independent agents in Irish society. In this respect, it is worth noting that Ireland has not been infected by the testing culture that has attached itself to the linguistic integration of adult immigrants in so many other countries (Pulinx, Van Avermaet and Extramiana 2014). There are two reasons for this. In the 1990s the immigrants for whom official English language programmes were provided were refugees, whose status gave them security of residence that could not be undermined by failure in a language test, and since 2004 the overwhelming majority of immigrants have come from other EU member states and thus have freedom of movement independent of their language proficiency. Because it is the dominant language of schooling, the children of immigrants must acquire near-native proficiency in English if they are to fulfil their educational potential, but before we describe the arrangements the Irish government has put in place to support this process, it is appropriate to explain how Ireland’s language policy impinges on its language education policy.

Language education policy

As we have already noted, Irish is an obligatory curriculum subject from the beginning to the end of schooling. In some English-medium schools Irish is used as a medium of spontaneous communication on a daily basis, but in most it enjoys the same solitude as it does in Irish society at large. Traditionally, four foreign languages have been taught at post-primary level: French, German, Italian and Spanish. More recently, special projects of the Department of Education have introduced foreign languages to the last two years of primary schooling and supported the introduction of Japanese, Chinese and Russian at post-primary level. The Irish system makes no provision to teach immigrants’ languages as curriculum subjects, but it offers school-leaving exams in fifteen EU languages that are not part of the curriculum: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Modern Greek, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, Swedish. Students qualify to take the exam in one of these languages if they come from another EU country, speak the language in question as a first language, are following a general programme of study leading to the Leaving Certificate, and are entered for the Leaving Certificate exam in English. Although aimed at native speakers, these exams are modelled on the first foreign language final written paper of the European Baccalaureate, which invites the suspicion that their chief if unintended purpose is to provide candidates with easy points for university entrance.

From the perspective of curriculum and pedagogy, languages (including English as the majority language of schooling) exist in isolation from one another. Although this replicates the situation of English and Irish in society at large, it has not reflected the views of language education specialists in Ireland for more than thirty years. In 1986, the report of the Board of Studies for Languages set up by the newly established Curriculum and Examinations Board offered this definition of language:

Language is

– the chief means by which we think – all language activities, in whatever language, are exercises in thinking;

– the vehicle through which knowledge is acquired and organized;

– the chief means of interpersonal communication;

– a central factor in the growth of the learner’s personality;

– one of the chief means by which societies and cultures define and organise themselves and by which culture is transmitted within and across societies and cultures. (Curriculum and Examinations Board 1986: 2)

Starting from this definition, the report argued in favour of an integrated language curriculum in which the relation between first, second and foreign language learning would be made explicit both in the structure and content of the curriculum and in classroom practice. The same argument was made almost twenty years later, first in a discussion paper on languages in the post-primary curriculum commissioned by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (Little 2003) and again in the Language Education Policy Profile that the Council of Europe’s Language Policy Division developed in collaboration with the Department of Education in 2006 and 2007 (Council of Europe and Department of Education and Skills 2008). This latter document recommended that policy should ‘decompartmentalise’ languages and ‘aim to develop in each individual citizen a single plurilingual competence …, rather than what is evident at present, namely an unrelated set of fragmentary competences in particular languages’ (Council of Europe and Department of Education and Skills 2008: 33; emphasis in original). The argument was repeated in Towards an Integrated Language Curriculum in Early Childhood and Primary Education, a research report by Pádraig Ó Duibhir and Jim Cummins commissioned by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (Ó Duibhir and Cummins 2012). This time it was underpinned by reference to Cummins’s linguistic interdependence hypothesis (Cummins 1979), which claims that in favourable conditions skills developed in one language can be transferred relatively straightforwardly to another language. The later chapters of this book provide detailed evidence to support this claim, confirming that significant benefits accrue from what the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001: 4) calls the ‘plurilingual approach’. But until recently the official curriculum remained firmly wedded to the belief that languages should be taught and learned in isolation from one another. Inevitably, this (largely unexamined) belief helped to shape the official policy response to the challenge posed by the need to educate large numbers of children and adolescents whose home language is neither English nor Irish. The beginning of a shift in official attitudes was marked by the introduction of a new Primary Language Curriculum in 2017. Focused on...