The present study explores the process of becoming a primary level teacher of Irish, the official yet a minority language in Ireland. Since all primary level teachers must teach Irish, becoming a primary teacher in Ireland is bound up in complex ways with the process of becoming a teacher of a minority language and with personal attitudes to, and views on, the language itself. The current study analyses similarities and differences in views relating to teachers’ role in promoting the language, as well as issues in proficiency in the language, at the beginning and end of initial teacher education. Also examined is the extent to which above-average self-reported proficiency in Irish influences the experience of teaching Irish. Data is derived from responses to closed and supplementary open-ended questionnaire items administered to two different groups of pre-service teachers: at the beginning (n=75) and the end of initial teacher education (n=91), and is supplemented with data from interviews conducted with a subgroup of Group 2 (n=30). Data from this mixed methods study show that changes occur in the way teachers conceive of their future roles as teachers of Irish, and reveal the need for more support in aspects of their role such as nurturing positive attitudes to Irish amongst children and a desire for shared responsibility in promoting the language more generally.
Of the currently limited available data on the mental health of students in Ireland the most notable are provided in the College Lifestyle and Attitudinal National (CLAN) Survey (Hope, Dring, & Dring, 2005). Recently, Houghton et al. (2012) found among students at an Irish university that women reported significantly higher levels of symptomatology than men on each of the three 6-item subscales of the Brief Symptom Inventory 18 (BSI 18; Derogatis, 2001) (anxiety, depression, and somatization) and the Global Severity Index (GSI; summed total of the 18 items). Similarly, final-year students had significantly worse mental health than non-final-year students. Internal reliability, construct validity, and factor structure of the BSI 18, were reported but no data on the test-retest reliability of the measure. Our aim was to supplement these findings by reporting on the test-retest reliability of the BSI 18 in a small sample of Irish college students.
Within the broader contexts of language maintenance, revitalisation and use, schools have an important role to play in the early transmission of minority or minoritized languages. Through effective classroom-based practices, teachers can offer rich, continuous linguistic experiences for the young people they teach that can lead to long-term, sustained engagement with language over time. How effective a given approach or practice may be in delivering a linguistic outcome in different contexts depends to a large extent on the skills and competence of the teacher involved (Fitzpatrick et al., 2018, p. 59), and the skills and competence of the teacher are usually rooted in their early experiences as student teachers. Initial teacher education (ITE) programmes are therefore central to the delivery of effective classroom-based practices and fundamental in generating autonomous teachers who can explore critically the different pedagogical approaches as they pertain to minority language contexts. This paper provides a comparative overview of the current issues and challenges facing ITE for primary education in two distinct minority language settings, namely Wales and Ireland. Both settings provide Welsh-medium or Irish-medium immersion education, as well as English-medium education offering Welsh or Irish as statutory subjects up to age 16. Both contexts also offer ITE programmes through the medium of Welsh or Irish, catering specifically for those student teachers wishing to teach in immersion settings. Both contexts face a number of shared challenges in terms of the content, design and delivery of an effective ITE programme for the context. We therefore highlight areas in which resources and methodologies could be shared amongst all those involved in ITE where minority language maintenance is a key component of education.
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