Mr. Paul Caffrey:

With regard to the piece I quoted from a newspaper, I happened to have that with me when I was on a school inspection. I saw a first-year class which I thought was unduly heavy in terms of grammatical input so I told the teacher when talking outside in the lobby that there would be plenty of time for that. The children's English grammar is muddled but nobody cares because they know exactly what the children want to say and they are making themselves understood. There is a time later on when the grammar and the rules are introduced in the context of communication. That is the direction in which we are trying to move things, with some success. We see quite a range, from very good communicative teaching, where the lesson from beginning to end is conducted in Spanish, Irish, French and so on, to the other extreme, where there is an imbalance of grammar at an unduly early stage, with students copying down lists of words and so on. That is changing, however, and we are certainly encouraging the change.

The new media are helping in this regard and I encourage committee members to look the website languagesinitiative.ie, which is the website of the post-primary languages initiative. It gives good examples and is a place where students and teachers are interacting, sharing source materials and so on. It is a move that is happening, although it is certainly taking time.

I believe the new junior cycle framework will help a lot because there will be more of an emphasis on learning outcomes and "can do" statements. This means, for example, that the student knows at the beginning of the year that, by Christmas, he or she will be able to do certain communicative things in the language, such as ask someone their name, be able to spell and so on. There will also be greater emphasis on assessment for learning so, rather than waiting for a written exam at the end of three years and focusing on that, there will be a continuous assessment of all the language skills, with a prioritising of oral language. That is certainly the way we are moving and I am seeing that change happening in schools. A change of that magnitude takes time but I believe it is happening and I see very good examples of it happening.