Welsh medium

[SmilingMakesMyFaceAche]

Anyone with any experience of welsh medium education? Come tell me your experiences! Neither DH or I speak welsh but I did gcse and I m willing to learn if we choose welsh medium for DS.
Advice and comments welcomed

Welsh medium schools in the South Wales valleys tended in my experience to have fantastically active parental support, tons of extra curricular stuff organised by volunteers etc.

Frankly, if I had the opportunity to send my DS to a school which would enable him to become actively bilingual, I'd jump at the chance. There is a world of difference between being basically monolingual, "doing lessons" once a week in French, Spanish, Mandarin etc, and being actively bilingual and just knowing what it feels like to think directly in another language. It makes picking up other languages later on so much easier - all the "oooh, it's not useful outside Wales" is just entirely wrong. As www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17892521 shows, it actually fundamentally changes your brain. Most of the world isn't monolingual, the UK is unusual in this.

Sadly being in England, it's going to be a struggle giving DS what I had easily and naturally just by being immersed in an actively bilingual school environment. Your DS is a lucky boy, Smiling.

That makes sense soup, it's why I'm always surprised that the take up of a MFL at 15 is lower in WM schools.

Lower than in EM schools I mean, and much lower than in England.

being actively bilingual and just knowing what it feels like to think directly in another language. It makes picking up other languages later on so much easier

Is there any evidence that bilingual English/Welsh speakers go on to do better at MFL than children who just speak English.

don't know about specifically WM schools but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that actively bilingual dc acquire and process MFL more effectively than monolingual dc. It is to do with the way the brain has been wired for more than 1 mother tongue.

Yes, the BBC article went into the theory, but I just wondered it there is any evidence in practice, seeing that Wales has a significant group of bilingual children and evidence from GCSE results would be fairly easy to source.

So, despite having a definite advantage in learning a MFL, pupils in WM education generally choose not to. I wonder why. Maybe difficult to find good MFL teachers who can teach through the medium of Welsh?

Do Welsh speakers not go on to be MFL teachers? If they have the early advantage of being bilingual, the theory would suggest that they would.

I'm not sure Cecily, I just thought it might be one explanation for weak take-up of MFL in WM schools but I suppose it doesn't explain why EM schools in Wales also have a lower take-up than English schools - although I was looking at 2011 statistics so that might have changed, I don't know.

It would be interesting to know if those pupils at WM schools achieve higher grades in MFL than their EM counterparts, but I can't find anything.

Quite seriously, could the low take up be down to quite an introspective view of the world? Also a question, I was given to understand that just learning another language at an early age is good, not necessarily to bikingual standard. Is that not true?

Well the reason I didn't take a MFL was because I thought I was already doing English and Welsh, and couldn't be faffed taking a third. I'm not claiming that Welsh students are all as lazy as me btw, but maybe just something like there not being enough options available? So they're already doing two languages, and taking a third would limit their other choices. It seems a shame if they have a natural proclivity for languages. Or maybe they see Welsh as useful and meaningful, and useful actually for employment in Wales, whereas the benefits of learning French or Spanish are not as immediately obvious. Anyway, from what I have read, Estyn are all over it and one would hope for an upswing soon.

Can someone please reassure me that Welsh GCSE is not compulsory?

DH is a teacher in a bilingual school and says it is compulsory. Some schools do a short course though, which is less intence.

What, in regular schools too? Do they limit the other subjects that can be taken? Is there room for the three sciences for example?

Its all duel science now i believe. The second language is the thing thats typically not opted for so there is a low take up for French, italian, spanish, German etc.

It's a good thing you can't all hear DH's opinion on this subject!

Thats why we need Welsh public debate on this. So many systems have been set up and so much of our money committed on various things like Welsh through to GCSE, money has been diverted from some life critical services like the NHS. It feels as though these things are happening too us rather than they are of our choosing.

Reducing budgets for WAG in the coming years are hopefully going to push these issues to the forefront for discussion. Alternatively WAG might use its latest power, to accrue debt, to avoid discussion and dig a big hole for us all to fall into.

I live in Scotland so clearly not welsh medium! However my dc go to a Gaelic school (equivalent!). Neither dh or I have much Gaelic though my phonics are excellent, I can read anything!!

My dc are now in p5, p6 and s1 (yrs 4, 5 and 7) in GME. They are all fluent in 2 languages (and dd1 has picked up French at a frankly astonishing rate - she's done it for 2.5 years and was actually chatting in French to a French-speaking African girl at church last Sunday!). They all also are reading etc in English at or above their supposed level, all are doing well in maths and all play 2 instruments (which was one reason we chose GME as bilingualism encourages musical ability - they all play piano, and then dd1 plays accordion, ds drums and dd2 fiddle).

I honestly can't see why anyone who has the option wouldnt go for bilingual education. Which might explain why in glasgow the gaelic school is the largest in the city and they're building another one!

A couple of articles to make you froth gaelicsheep :

TES

Daily Post

It is only tangentially relevant - but 3 of the (perhaps 15?) linguists at my Oxbridge college had been in Welsh medium education. It did seem that the early bilingiualism - all had English families - had helped them to excel in other MFLs later.

See, we're currently trying to decide whether to make this relocation permanent or whether to leave an escape route open. The escape route is sounding more and more essential. There just isn't the aggressive political drive behind Gaelic education, and as a result I was much more comfortable with the idea. The reasons we decided against were varied, but included the fact that DS would not be at school with his local peers. The quality of education he would have received was not in doubt, in my mind, although the secondary teacher who posted earlier did throw some doubt on that. I think it is to Gaelic's detriment that there isn't a bit stronger drive behind it, to at least make some Gaelic teaching available in all schools as an option. Wales's approach, on the contrary, I find heavy handed and it makes me want to run away.

DS tells me if they want to go to the toilet they have to ask in Welsh. It is all too much, the WAG needs to focus on what is important and it is plainly failing in every respect. I am regretting this move more every day.

I'm jumping into this debate several pages in, but I just couldn't resist.

Very few Welsh-speaking children have problems speaking English - I have never met even one. And in the OP's case, presumably, as an English speaker she will be speaking to her son in English at home anyway.

I fail to see why Welsh speakers should not have the right to education in their own language - and English speaking Welsh people are hardly lacking for schools!

To those who consider it a waste of time learning a minority language. There are thousands of languages spoken in the world today, a large number of which are minority tongues. Do their speakers not merit attention? Do they all have to be Nobel prize winners before they can be considered worth speaking to?

Incidentally, gaelic, words for modern technology are often borrowed across languages. I am a fluent speaker of Greek, a language that I assure you is very much alive and well, and words like "modem", "router", etc, are all taken directly from English. This doesn't mean that the Greeks are all really speaking English and playing at being Greek speakers, it simply means that Greek, like Welsh, borrows words. English does the same thing. Where do you think the word "problem" comes from? Or "paradise"? Or "flannel"? The list is simply endless.

My children are bilingual (English/ Greek). I consider it a positive thing. If we lived in Wales, I would send them to Welsh medium so they could gain another language, another perspective on the world.

Anecdotally, and may be irrelevant in the greater scheme of bilingualism, but I've noticed that my children have easily picked up a bit of Russian from a Russian speaker I know, where their monolingual friends have been slower. Even my SN son waves goodbye when he hears "da sfidanya!"

And personally speaking, as a multilingual, I find that the more languages I know, the easier it is to learn them! It's not a cliche, it really is true. Your general language knowledge helps you to understand or work out new words you haven't seen before, and grammar just seems to fall into place as you go along.

alexpolismum - I am more than conscious I am having a disproportionate say on this thread, unfortunately the subject - it turns out - is quite close to my heart for the wrong reasons. It is the compulsory aspect of all this that really really gets my goat. There is such a clear political agenda and I hate it!

I do feel, though, I'm perhaps having this discussion on the wrong thread, so sorry, it's just an unfortunate time for the subject to come up.