Gaelic medium education

[Mellymum13]

Hello, I have a son in Gaelic medium. I myself am a teacher in English medium. My son is now half way through P2 and still can’t read and doesn’t confidently know single letter sounds. I have been told by his teacher and the principal teacher that he is on track and not to worry. However by this stage in P2 in English medium I would be concerned if a child could not read. Do any parents have experience of this? Is it normal to take longer in Gaelic education? Thank you

Are you/he fluent Gaelic speakers? If not, I suspect it will take him much longer to learn to read. As you know, a lot of early reading is based on predicting what the next word will be on the basis of existing knowledge.
eg children have a book with a picture of a dog with a ball. They already know that the words dog and ball are likely to come up - along with the colours, size etc of the items. This makes recognising the words so much easier. If he is still acquiring the language the processing he is doing is much more complicated than that of a native speaker child.

Imagine you as a literate, but non Russian speaking adult learn cyrillic script. You know the letters. You are then presented with a page of Russian to read. You will probably not be able to decypher very much of it, despite having the letters, because you do not know the words. Even if you do decypher it correctly, you will not be certain because you do not fully understand what you are reading.

I am assuming reading Gaelic is like reading Irish - so lots of complicated consonant clusters and changing prefixes and suffixes. I think that is intrinsically harder than reading simple English ( though it gets easier later because it is consistent, unlike English).

PS You might get more replies if you put this in the craicnet section where there may be more parents with children in Irish medium education. Not sure how many children there are in Gaelic medium schools.

Hi, GME parent here.

My child was the same, and yes, I believe that it does take longer. We’re told that the children will lag EME children in the middle years of primary school, then level up and often overshoot by P6/P7.

My child is only in P3, and I’m having some of the same fears as you. I’ve not been as proactive at reading at home as I would otherwise have been, because I’m not fluent in Gaelic, and didn’t want to disrupt their Gaelic acquisition.

I’m seeing now what a huge adversary I have in screens… it’s frustrating for me, I feel the longer it takes my child to become a fluent reader (in English, a lot of the Gaelic books are just not that appealing to my child), the longer Netflix etc has to establish dominance.

Saying that, I do tend to be a terrible over worrier! Many kids in the school seem to be bright, articulate, curious and courteous, so I think it’s doing something right…

HI @Mellymum13 !

It's only natural to worry as a parent. We know lots of parents whose kids are being raised bilingual or trilingual; they, too, worry in the same way.

Such kids need to be given the time they need, especially where the script is different, an important factor which has already been pointed out. Eventually, though, they do well with their languages, often becoming very strong.

I was raised with six languages on two continents in two very different script groups, all by the age of eleven. I still function in both script groups and looking back, I consider myself lucky. And it's my little superpower!