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Russian and French teaching ?

  • 11-11-2010 8:10pm
    #1
    paperplane93
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 49 ✭


    hey , just wondering if somebody could give me some advice. .
    Which would be a better course if I wanted to do language teaching ?

    Languages with concurrent teacher education in Limerick

    or

    French and Russian and then do a PGDE later ?

    Anyone have any ideas? I know most schools don't teach Russian but I just have an interest in it. Does anyone know if it's tough? I think trinners is the only place that does it . .
    Tagged:


Comments

  • #2
    alex73
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭alex73


    Chinese is the one of the future.


  • #3
    Rosita
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,147 ✭✭✭Rosita


    paperplane93 wrote: »
    hey , just wondering if somebody could give me some advice. .
    Which would be a better course if I wanted to do language teaching ?

    Languages with concurrent teacher education in Limerick

    or

    French and Russian and then do a PGDE later ?

    Anyone have any ideas? I know most schools don't teach Russian but I just have an interest in it. Does anyone know if it's tough? I think trinners is the only place that does it . .


    I think you need to get clear in your head how employable you want to be. I know that sounds like a silly thing as obviously everyone wants to be very employable but there is a conflict between doing something obscure - in a second-level school context - merely because you have an interest in it, and the possibilities afterwards. You might also find it a struggle taking it up ab initio which could impact on your grades in your degree which might have deleterious consequences for your PGDE possibilities.

    French, by a mile, is the most common language in terms of exam sits - I am excluding English and Irish obviously - followed in the distance by German and further back Spanish. Less than 300 people sat Russian in the Leaving Cert, and Chinese does not even register on the scale. And while it's very much the standard thing to talk about the Chinese economy and therefore the importance of the language I would be surprised if it was a significant presence in schools in my lifetime.

    Germany is the biggest economy in Europe and we have been in the European Union/EEC since 1973 yet that language has made little enough impact. So I would be slow to read much into economic predictors in terms of the implication for language teaching at second-level anyway. I think assumptions that the language powerbase will automatically follow the economic powerbase are lazy given the strength of English at this stage.

    Plus I imagine there would be a perception that Chinese is difficult to learn and teenagers (and many undergraduates too) are demotivated far more by perceived difficulty and potential workload of a language/subject than some abstract economic potential of the language.


  • #4
    FerrisBueller
    Closed Accounts Posts: 81 ✭✭FerrisBueller


    Hi paperplanes 93,
    I'm currently in the Languages with Concurrent Teacher Education programme in UL, any info you want feel free to ask :)


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