Category: Education

The Victorians Who Wanted Welsh to Die

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Supporters of Britain’s Celtic linguistic heritage will be feeling optimistic glee this week, with the excellent news that Welsh learning is booming. While a Welsh revival leads the way, there are hopeful signs elsewhere, too;  the ‘I have some Gaelic’ crowd has doubled over the last ten years.

If the gains seem modest, it’s worth remembering how far we’ve come. I was rummaging in the British Newspaper Archive this week, hunting some material on serialised Welsh lessons in old newspapers. “Folk lessons” in Gaeilge abound in the early 20th Century, and the length of some series suggests that newspaper learning went down quite well with the readership.

The 19th-century trail for Welsh, though, is a lot patchier than for Irish. What you do find, on the other hand, is plenty of column inches spent on disparaging the language. Editorials don’t hold back, either. They talk of utter uselessness, disguising the offence with that thin veil of Victorian ‘progress’.

Welsh Barb

One letter writer, choosing to remain anonymous (aware, perhaps, of the cruel barb of their remarks) weighed in on the provision of Welsh-speaking bishops to Wales in a letter to the Chester Chronicle in 1847. The letter states:

“I would hazard an opinion as to the necessity of the Welsh Bishops knowing the language of the country. … I believe 9 out of every 10 of enlightened and thinking Welshmen  would agree with me that the Welsh language is an evil and a positive disadvantage. …the lower orders are striving throughout the Principality to learn English – and why? The most ignorant servant who can speak broken English and can write, writes a letter to his friend or his sweetheart in English generally – this I know to be a fact.
The mechanic who can speak English, read and write, gets to the top of his business, while his less accomplished countryman, though equally ingenious as a workman is glad to be employed under him. … I should be extremely rejoiced to see some of my excellent countrymen promoted to the bench; but so long as a small nook of a small island is isolated by its language they are much less likely to do so than if the Welsh language was reckoned among the dead.”

An Observer

Chester Chronicle, Friday 26th March 1847

Lands with a thud, that, doesn’t it?

But if we collect our objective thoughts (deep breaths!) there is so much going on in this short passage. It’s the reduction of language to job opportunity, a way for the “lower orders” to improve their lot. It’s the ranking of languages as more primitive and more civilised (that linking of English with reading and writing). Even more bafflingly, the letter sets language use up as an either/or choice. The author doesn’t admit the idea of bilingual speakers as even a remote possibility.

And remarkably, it’s come to be viewed that way by those, like our letter writer, who count themselves as members of those communities. It’s the outcome of a homogenising, colonial Victorian project that steamrolled out difference in the name of Britannia. Regional difference is simply burden; there is no Wales – just the Principality, and the economic gains to chase within it. We see the very same attitudes towards regional dialects of English.

Sign of the Times?

A lot of our reaction to this, of course, is a product of changing times. Victorian society engaged almost obsessively in social improvement and optimisation; improving woeful working and living conditions could force this kind of all or nothing mentality that left no room for nuance.

Thankfully, this kind of binary thinking about community languages sounds, rightly, very old-fashioned. The Observer got their wish for over a century, but views like that have a lot less currency nowadays. That said, a glance at the comments section of any National article on Scottish Gaelic shows that the work in speaking up for Britain’s Celtic languages is never quite done.

It’s a reminder that languages never die because they are useless. They die because speakers are convinced they are. With a bit of work, that trick is getting harder and harder to pull off.

The Linguascope Conference 2023 : Inclusivity in Language Teaching

The Duty of Inclusivity : Matching Language to Social Reality

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This Saturday saw the Linguascope conference, fast becoming a trusty fixture in the language learning calendar. This year’s edition took place at the fabulous Mama Shelter in London, and as always, the event is a nice opportunity for us resource bods to learn from classroom teachers’ experience.

The overarching theme of the 2023 edition was diversity and inclusion. The precept is simple: no student should feel left out by the curriculum, unable to identify themselves in its content. It’s high time. After all, language use in the wild is already changing to reflect that updated social reality, not least in terms of pronoun usage. It follows logically that the teaching of language should mirror how it is being used.

Framing Inclusivity

Sadly, it’s still a topic that is politically charged. The reasons are many, but fundamentally, it seems that societal change triggers defensiveness, and defensive viewpoints are, in turn, prone to becoming entrenched. The fact that the change implicates identity, the hues that define our very existence, doubtlessly plays its part in how emotive it is.

And there were discouraging stories of friction and pushback amongst the conference delegates. Not amongst students, but from parents, guardians, boards, and other staff. It’s easy for us to judge them, but harder – and undoubtedly more compassionate – to understand that fear prevents some from welcoming difference.

But the flip side is the overwhelming positivity in stories of otherwise marginalised students feeling welcome and valid in the shared learning space. Their reactions show that inclusivity is less a political agenda than simply a truer reflection of social realities. What’s more, that heart-opening positivity is double-sided. Unless you live in a box, you will encounter diversity in the real world. Inclusive learning materials prepare us better to meet that with acceptance, tolerance and love, no matter how homogenous our own environments are.

As one wise voice proffered at the conference, inclusivity is not a question of promoting, but simply of representing. That’s the key: being inclusive doesn’t make change, but simply reflects it.

Individual Duty

It’s a topic that raises questions for our own, individual learning too. How welcoming and validating are our target language skills? Is the language we learn representative of diverse ways of being? What social reality is reflected in the resources we used to learn French, German, Spanish? There’s a duty for us to audit our sources, and stay in the loop, to ensure we’re not hanging onto any linguistic fossils.

It’s an issue that came up in a recent Greek lesson of mine. The conversation turned to race, and I came completely unstuck. I realised that I lacked all tools in my target language to talk about race in anything but the most unnuanced, bald terms. In this case, honesty, humility and a good teacher bridged the divide and filled the gap. But it’s even better to preempt the need and do that work in advance.

Linguascope’s inclusivity conference is a reminder to us all to build that into our language learning. 

On that note, I’ll end with a link to the excellent inclusivity resources at Twinkl, signposted by the brilliant Sharon Barnes in a very on-point and thoughtful talk. Proof of the heaps of support out there for anyone hoping to make all feel welcome on their learning journey.

Dictionaries - a great fallback, but is it cheating? Image from freeimages.com

But is it cheating? Language support tools and polyglot pride

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You’ve prepared for this moment. You’re about to walk up to the counter and order that coffee in the language you’ve been learning for months. But it’s the heat of the moment. You’re a bit nervous. What’s the polite way to ask for something again? Is it cheating to look it up?

These are times when the sheer availability of information blurs the line between achieving and cheating. Digital tools are challenging the notion of success across all education fields. So what exactly is cheating? And do we need to worry about it, as independent language learners?

Defining cheating

How we define cheating changes a lot according to circumstances. For example, during my high school language exams, the idea of taking along vocabulary support was a strict no-no. Students had to commit everything to memory. It was hard work, but we accepted it as a necessary slog.

So it was with a little envy that I learnt, some years later, that some exams boards were now allowing dictionaries in during the writing component. Dictionaries! They would have chucked us poor students straight out of the hall after even a whiff of a crib sheet or a glimpse of scribbled notes on a hand.

That said, there is some sense in allowing some brain-support tools into the exam environment. Learning how to use resources like dictionaries and verb tables is as much a part of language proficiency as the actual committing to memory, and more so than ever these days. We live in a world full of expert, digital help at the touch of a smartphone. Testing how students use their language knowledge and resourcefulness is, perhaps, a better way to gauge how they will cope in the real world.

Setting a high bar

Despite all this, there is a gleeful satisfaction in smashing the memory game. I suspect that there is a memory purist in many of us polyglot enthusiasts, setting the cheating bar pretty high. Who hasn’t felt a little fist-pump moment that time a perfectly formed phrase just trips off the tongue without a single prompt?

More importantly, no support tool is perfect. Maybe you have also given a knowing eye-roll when hearing that old, annoying chestnut about language learning being unnecessary in a world of Google Translate. Likewise, you have also probably spotted a couple of very iffy translations yourself when using it. Machine translation is getting good – but it’s not quite there yet.

The fact is that tech tools are incredibly powerful. But knowing how the language works and combining your own knowledge with their answers is exponentially more powerful. These platforms support – they do not replace – the expert linguist in us.

Parlour tricks for the everyday

Of course, improving memory to maestro levels is a noble goal in itself, and many have achieved fame on the back of that. Russian mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky displayed some phenomenal recall skills that bought him to the attention of a public far beyond his home country.

A raft of pop science books and documentaries feted his seemingly superhuman abilities to remember items. In the 1950s, a decade obsessed with the rapid progress of humanity towards a perfected pinnacle, Shereshevsky ignited the question: are we born with super-memory, or can we develop it? As language learners, it’s something we would all love to know.

Well, the answer is encouraging: it seems that we can learn it. Memorisation expert Tony Buzan has been impressing amateur mnemonists for years with his books, crossing the divide between parlour trick and genuinely useful learning skill. He has even applied some of his mind-mapping memory techniques directly to language learning, and the results seem promising from the reviews.

Whether or not we call dictionary look-up cheating, getting these tricks under your belt is surely more rewarding than that reach-for-the-phone “I give up!” moment on a trip.

Aim high – but be kind to yourself

In short, there is no need to be too hard on yourself. Support tools help us through many a sticky situation. In fact, these tools can be invaluable during the learning process itself. Translation and dictionary sites can be systematically mined to make connections and expand your vocabulary from day one.

Still, perfect recall improvement techniques can help you use these tools less and less frequently in the wild. And managing that can be a rich source of pride at your abilities as a language learner.