A chara, - I can see no point in lamenting low exam results in Junior Cert Irish. This is not to say that the problem is insoluble, irrelevant, unavoidable, or anything like that. But if we want to reverse this trend of falling standards, action, not words, is what is needed. Only prompt and decisive action can do what needs to be done. We need to change the way Irish is taught to, and perceived by, students.
I will be sitting my Junior Cert this year. I learn French, German and Irish at higher level and I can see a crucial difference between the way Irish is taught and the way Continental languages are taught. In French and German classes, lessons are very structured and the language is taught in a practical context. We are shown how to order food in a restaurant, reserve seats on a train or plane, or ask a sales assistant for help. Everything learned is geared towards being able to communicate with real people and cope with real situations. Of course, what we learn is controlled by what is on the Junior Cert course, but the course is so constructed as to give students a practical education in the language.
Not so with Irish! Everything we learn is abstract, and the language is never portrayed as having a practical application. Mostly, we are taught to answer questions on short, simple articles from Irish-language magazines and to comment on poems and short stories. So much emphasis is placed on these rather abstract uses of language because in the Junior Cert we will have to be able to carry out these tasks. Even the stories and poems we read are not treated as artistic works but as something we study for the purpose of commenting on in an exam (so little significance is attached to the actual wording of the stories that we generally study a much shorter summary of the plot without ever reading the original text). We do learn how to write postcards and the odd formal letter, which is about as practical as it gets, because they are on the exam course. Everything is geared, not towards practical communication, but towards doing well in the exam.
I, and many of my fellow-students, all of us very fond of the language, are extremely frustrated by the exam-centred course and the methods used in teaching it. From what I can see, the problem with Irish education is that exams have become an end in themselves. Surely exams are a part, not a culmination, of the learning process, itself a means to an end - fluency, literacy and practical knowledge. Exams are not a practical aspect of a person's life, once they have left school. Education is for life, during and after one's schooling.
If the Irish language is to be saved, its relevance must be continually stressed by parents and teachers. People need to perceive Irish not as an abstract remnant of days gone by, but as a real, living language spoken by real, living people. And for people to see the language as relevant, we need to make it relevant. It must be used more, in the media, in shops, in the workplace, and in schools - inside and outside the classroom. Otherwise, the best efforts to portray Irish as relevant must ultimately fail.
Children should be exposed to Irish in the home at an early age, for they learn best when very young, and the child's home life must support a pro-Irish ethos at school if efforts to promote the language are to succeed. We need a nationwide change of attitudes if we are to preserve this precious part of our national heritage.
As regards Mr Myers's comparison between the migration of the swallows and the demise of Irish, I say only this: he is neither naturalist nor linguist if he has forgotten that the swallows will come back in the spring. Once we let Irish go, it will be gone for ever. - Is mise,
Esther Kallen, Fairview, Dublin 3.