As teachers grapple with the problem of pupils who speak little English, school may have a model solution, writes Ruadhán MacCormaic.
The description Nadege Kanufando gives of her 15-year-old self is hard to reconcile with the young woman she has become.
When she enrolled at Castleknock Community College three years ago, Nadege had only had two years of formal education in her native Democratic Republic of Congo and her English was a bare shelf propped up with a few leaden greetings. She was shy and found it impossible to follow her teachers in class. "It was difficult for the first year - I didn't understand anything," she recalls.
Nadege was presented last year with an award for Language Learner of the Year by Léargas, the agency responsible for managing educational co-operation programmes, and now she is held aloft as an example of the possibilities that drive Castleknock's approach to language-learning.
Forged out of frustration with current practice, the school set
up its Language Centre - one of the first in the country - as a
separate department two years ago to co-ordinate services for the
12 per cent of its students who come from abroad. Here, in a large
room decorated with maps,
flags and outsized verb tables, full-time co-ordinator
Mary Ryan and three part-time language teachers can assess each
student's needs and devise a programme to suit them.
"People were coming to the school and we really didn't know what to do with them. So we were sending them to the learning support department," says Ryan. "They were misplaced for a start and the learning support department were full to the doors anyway, so here was an additional challenge."
Students with little English can now be withdrawn from class up
to four times a week for intensive training; for others, it might
be once or twice a week. And because standard language course
material doesn't respond precisely to the school's needs, much of
the teaching material has been designed by staff themselves,
from picture dictionaries to match each syllabus to
folders on English pronunciation for every native language
group.
Almost organically, the Language Centre has become a cosmopolitan meeting place, where international students can play games and where plans are made for the annual intercultural festival. Last year's event focused on the four main groups in the "newcomer" category: India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The Department of Education is said to be keeping an eye on Castleknock's language model, but for all its evident successes, there is a sense that teachers are feeling their way through each intercultural conundrum as they arise. Should it be left to schools to improvise like this?
"We need to be trained formally,"
says Ryan. "Every teacher needs to be trained in how to
teach English as a second or other language. Even though we're
doing it formally here, all the other teachers are doing it
informally.
We need [all] teachers to get some form of in-service training in teaching international students because sometimes you can get 10 to 12 different nationalities in one class and they might all have different languages. It's so difficult. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it's schools with socioeconomic problems that have this huge challenge."
Ryan says next year's intercultural festival will be founded not on difference as such but around the notion of "common zones" between Irish and other cultures. This reflects a wider shift in staff thinking on the issue.
"I suppose what we're trying to do really is to facilitate all our students to maintain their own culture and also to integrate within the common zone - to develop interculturalism organically. I don't have the answers, but we're putting a huge amount of thought into intercultural mediation - creating the common zones."
In Ryan's hand is a folder marked "Yoruba". It contains lists of
the English sounds that speakers of the west African language might
have trouble mastering,
along with locally-devised rhyming lessons to help them
along. Before a student gets this far, he will have spent hours
being taped, listened to and assessed by staff.
"It's very time-consuming," Ryan says. "And I suppose that's the kind of thing the department has to take on board. We really need time to do this properly. If we take the time now, we can put in place the building blocks to actually support the system. If we don't put in the time, we're going to live to regret it."