Should all education in Wales be bilingual?

23 comments

1. > – Welsh speaking teachers aren’t distributed evenly accross Wales. Most live in the West and aren’t necessarily willing to move.

   I don’t have much to add – just that this is an extremely significant point. You’re right that it could possibly be addressed gradually over many years, but it’s a more complex issue than we might hope it is.

2. No, this undermines Welsh speaking education and further minoritises the language. For minority languages, it’s important to have fully immersive environments to ensure the ability of speakers is quite high.

   Just to clarify, by minoritising – I mean it will undermine its position Welsh language schools and create a diglossic rather than bilingual position.

   Otherwise we’ll just end up creating a pidgin language through education.

   If you want a movement towards Welsh medium education, we need to ensure that speakers are confident and literate and it will need to be a step by step process. I’m not sure bilingual education will do this as I think it will lead to a generation of speakers who speak Welsh, but not with great confidence.

   I also kind of think that the new law tries to do this with English schools teaching 10% in Welsh, but I don’t think they be very confident speakers.

3. No, some people are not good at multiple languages, even if learned from birth.

   We should not lower the quality of education people receive in exchange for a language they’ll rarely use in a professional setting.

   I fully believe Welsh should be mandatory throughout all education, but I do not think people should be learning about complicated topics like calculus in a multiple languages.

   It’s hard enough as it is. Either teach in English or in Welsh, not both.

4. so, you wanna take teachers, already overworked and underpaid, that aren’t in Welsh Medium Schools, and give them even more work?

   I dunno why you would give more precedent to a language than to people.

5. I think funding Welsh lessons in English medium comprehensive schools is a waste of money. It would be better spent opening more Welsh medium primary schools, where kids from English-speaking homes (like myself) actually learn to speak Welsh.

6. I know nobody who wants this, and nobody whose primary language is Welsh.

   For higher education, I have been told by people who learned in Welsh through college, that they struggle to learn in English so their university course choices are extremely limited. They said it has left them at a disadvantage compared with people who learned in English. Many subjects are considered inaccessible, particularly technical subjects.

7. >- bilingual education would mean the end of Welsh medium only education

   Sociolinguists and language revitalisation experts say that your proposal will kill the language.

   The Welsh medium only education (immersion) is the only thing keeping Welsh from extinction. The solution is to generalise that immersion model from one end of Wales to the other. Obviously that would happen over a period of a decade or two, as you need to ramp up teacher training, because there’s not enough. But it’s been done before, notably in the Basque Country, who in a period of around 15 years trained and created hundreds of teachers, and these in turn taught thousands of students via immersion in Basque, some of whom then in turn became Basque teachers themselves when they became adults etc, creating a self-perpetuating system.

8. I mean we live in the country that has the most Welsh speaking people, it should both teach Welsh and allow for Welsh speakers

9. I’m a teacher and there are constantly job adverts for Welsh speaking teachers.

   There are always adverts for English speaking ones too.

   They cannot retain teachers at the moment. They are underpaid, overworked and underappreciated.

   You’d need to look at improving working conditions for teachers first, so they don’t burnout or quit the profession entirely. Then you could look at more education being in Welsh.

10. Welsh education is already falling behind England and this would only make things worse.

11. Bilingualism is a strength.

12. It should be a choice for the parents and the child if they decide to learn Welsh, if more people take it up then brill, if not then that’s fine also.

13. Yes

14. Waste of time. Useless language.

15. No, you shouldn’t ‘force’ a language on anyone. Why are we still wasting money trying to preserve a dying language? I live near Wrexham and in my lifetime have only heard a handful of conversations in Welsh when out and about. I do not understand the fascination with making X amount of people speak Welsh. People are largely not interested

16. Welsh medium education is the only way to secure the future of the language. In an ideal world all education in Wales would be Welsh medium as it is the only way to ensure all school leavers are fully fluent in both languages. Obviously we don’t live in an ideal world and don’t have enough teachers qualified to teach Welsh medium, but it should remain the long term ambition, and to gradually expand Welsh medium education provision as and when it becomes possible in a particular area

17. Yes

18. No – because Welsh is a waste of time. I love Wales and our heritage, but it has little to no value outside of Wales. English has become a global language spoken by ~1.5bn people globally.

19. “it would cost the government next to nothing”

20. “First graders”

21. No. People should have a choice. If you want to be taught through the medium of Welsh, then fine. If not, then that should be fine as well. The focus should be solely on increasing aspiration, bringing rigour back into the system and raising educational standards and attainment.

22. One of the biggest problems is new teachers in Welsh.

    If you want a History A Level teacher you need to find someone who a) speaks the language, b) has History training to Degree Level at least and c) wants to be a teacher (and train etc).

    This A is a large group, internationally, for English so even though B and C are subsets they are of a much bigger group. For Welsh A is just so much smaller.

    We need far more Welsh speakers to become teachers in order to grow, because at the moment we’ve got more leaving than joining and a decreasing number of people who want to train.

23. I would say that the main problem has always been teacher skills. Welsh Government have consistently lowered the bar for Welsh medium teachers in an attempt to get more. It’s worked to some extent, but we have ended up in a position where we have some pretty bad teachers who are mainly there for their language than their teaching ability.

    But more broadly you either aim for multi-lingual education (the norm across much of Europe) or you allow full parental choice everywhere as to the medium.

    There is little appetite for either of these in some quarters however, especially the former as it would require a move away from Welsh medium as well as English medium.

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