Innovation in Language Learning

In this paper we shall discuss and review issues around the intersectionality of language learning, intercultural education and social justice.

The EU NELLIP project provided an important opportunity to bring together language practitioners and users to explore the reality of language teaching and innovative methods in Ireland. When specifically exploring dimensions around the importance of maintaining the Irish language, many participants in NELLIP Workshops emphasized the significant value that the Irish language had “as part of their cultural identity”. Unpacking what that meant exactly was more difficult for participants to articulate however. Irish plays a complex part in identity, cultural competence and historic assertion of national rights in Ireland.

Only about 16% of the population is fluent in Irish and use it on a regular basis. Some 42% of Irish people would describe themselves as Irish speakers in the last National Census. This clearly demonstrates that language is an important symbolic aspect of cultural and social identity. In Ireland, as Watson asserts, Census figures are more the result of attitude than anything else. Indeed, language is by no means a neutral tool of communication, a series of grammatical rules put together. On the contrary, language is embedded with social values and norms. We are all socialized through language into our sociocultural environments (what we know, think and feel). Language competence is distinct from aspirational issues around identity however.

Often judgmental and discriminatory, language can blatantly serve as a means to alienate and degrade some social groups. Media stereotypes can reinforce this. However, the power and domination language can exercise can also be subtle, often unconscious and therefore much more insidious. Native speakers gain a particular status in relation to non-native speakers who might or might not have the ‘correct’ accent. Non-native speakers cannot escape evaluation, they cannot hide: exposed as soon as they utter a word. Self-perceived superiority of native speakers usually extends to their cultural understanding of the world. Furthermore, the dominant host language may act against real multilingualism in accommodating difference. Assimilation, conquest, shame, identity have all been factors in the evolving role of Irish for 150 years. It is for this reason that the study of language/s needs to be linked to intercultural education. As Gorski reminds us, not as a way to get along or to live in peace when some minority groups in society are treated unfairly. Intercultural education needs to be based on and pursue equality, social justice and human rights. In this space the use of Irish serves as a fascinating example of interesting practice.