‘Teachers should have say in language aid’

TEACHERS should have an input into the level of school support needed by children whose first language is not English, according to an expert working with dozens of such pupils in an inner-city primary school.

Rory McDaid is a language support teacher at St Gabriel’s National School in Dublin’s north inner-city, where about a third of the 200-plus pupils are from minority language backgrounds. He is also studying for a doctorate on the topic of first languages in school at St Patrick’s College in Dublin.

While he supports the provision of greater resources to schools with a mix of pupils from different nationalities, he believes each child’s need can be very different.

“There’s no typical English language learner. There are children who might have been born here to asylum seekers or refugees or migrant workers. Some might have no literacy and come from very horrific circumstances as refugees,” said Mr McDaid.

Most of the pupils he works with are from EU countries such as Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and Romania.

“A child develops conversational fluency within the first year or two. It means they can communicate their play words and pick up things from what the teacher is saying with visual clues,” said Mr McDaid.

“But if you take them out of an environment where they can pick up on visual clues and you give them a piece of text with no context around it, that’s where things slow down quickly. It takes between five and seven years to reach the level where they can learn academically like other pupils.”

Mr McDaid believes developing a fair test of a child’s proficiency in English is very difficult.

“Teachers will have a much better idea of the level where a child is at, and I would strongly suggest that there should be an element of teacher input into the results and that they should have a say in the level of language support each pupil would need,” he said.

The importance of the issue was highlighted by the attendance of more than 200 people at a conference on minority ethnicities and minority languages in education in Dublin yesterday.

Professor Jim Cummins, an expert from the University of Toronto in Canada, said that pupils whose first language was not English needed to make the equivalent of 15 months’ gain every school year to catch up with their peers within six years.