Creating Tasks in a Less-Commonly Taught Language for an Open Educational

Resource: Why the CEFR is important for Irish

Colm Ó Ciardubháin (Dublin City University)

Mairéad Nic Giolla Mhichíl (Dublin City University)

Outline of Paper

• Summary of socio-linguistic context in Ireland.• Open Educational Resources (OER):

– Benefits to lesser taught languages• The Common European Framework of Reference for

Languages (CEFR)– Benefits to lesser taught languages

• OER, CEFR in Irish language education• Our experience as part of the SpeakApps project

Irish in Ireland

• Irish is one of the two official languages of Ireland according to the constitution.

• 41.4% of the population (c. 4.5m) can speak Irish to some degree. (Census, 2011)

• Only a handful of monolingual speakers of Irish remain, if any.

Irish in Ireland: The Education System

• English medium schools– Irish taught in Primary Schools– Compulsory subject in Secondary Schools– Variety of Irish language courses across tertiary

education institutions• Irish language medium schools

– Scoileanna Gaeltachta in Irish speaking areas– Irish medium schools outside the Gaeltacht

• 144 Primary schools• 36 Secondary schools

Open Educational Resources

Definition:

“teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”

(UNESCO, 2012: 1)

OER and Less-commonly Taught Languages

• OER are viewed by Blyth (2013: 3) as allowing stakeholders to create their own ‘knowledge ecology’.

• This is of particular relevance to LCTLs, where economies of scale of learners and teachers may be potentially limited.

OER and Less-commonly Taught Languages

• Summary from LangOER project:– “Shortage of freely accessible resources in less used

languages (and social connectivity as a response)” (LangOER, 2014)

– “Reluctance to use OER in languages other than the native language” (ibid)

– “OER as means to face cultural/linguistic hegemony” (ibid)

The Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR)

• The CEFR framework “designed to provide a transparent, coherent and comprehensive basis for the elaboration of language syllabuses and curriculum guidelines, the design of teaching and learning materials, and the assessment of foreign language proficiency.” (Council of Europe, n.d.)

CEFR and LCTLs

• The CEFR provides LCTLs, as for other languages, with a meta-framework to communicate competences and proficiencies as well as providing a mechanism to benchmark linguistic outcomes.

• The application and implementation of the CEFR varies greatly across LCTLs (Lotti, 2007).

• The purposes for which CEFR were most commonly used, according to Lotti (2007: 14-15) were:

– Curriculum development– Production of textbooks and educational material– Language testing– To a lesser extent, language learning continuity

The CEFR and Irish language education

• The proliferation of the CEFR within teaching and learning of the Irish language can be described as limited.

• Lotti’s (2007) report into the take-up of the CEFR in LCTLs “it was not possible to gather enough information about the language education situation for Irish in Ireland” (10).

The CEFR and Irish language education

• Changes in CEFR proliferation the last 7 years:– Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge known as TEG (The European Certificate in Irish) has

made significant use of the CEFR. Individuals who successfully complete the TEG exams can receive a general language proficiency certificate specifying their CEFR proficiency level.

– The National Qualifications Authority of Ireland asserts that students who pass language subjects in the post-primary terminal examinations (The Leaving Certificate) will have achieved B1 (NQAI, 2007, p. 8).

– Core syllabuses for the teaching of Irish at third level is benchmarked at learners achieving B2 and C1 on its completion (Walsh & Nic Eoin, 2010).

– The Teaching Council of Ireland stipulation that prospective post-primary teachers must demonstrate B2.2 proficiency in the European language they wish to teach (Irish Teaching Council, 2013).

OER* and Irish languageTeastas Eorpach na Gaeilge

Source: http://teg.ie/gaeilge/teagasc.htm Accessed: 20th August 2014

OER* and Irish languagewww.teagascnagaeilge.ie

Source: http://www.arts.ulster.ac.uk/irish_syllabus/teacsanna-fise.php Accessed: 20th August 2014

OER and Irish languagemultidict.net

Source: http://multidict.net/clilstore/index.php Accessed: 20th August 2014

OER and Irish languageSpeakApps

• The aim of SpeakApps project is to create a free and open source online platform that gathers ICT-based applications and pedagogies to practice oral skills online. (SpeakApps,2014).

SpeakApps

OER and Irish language: SpeakApps

• Outputs for this phase of the project (relevant to this paper):– Continue with task development– Attract more users of the SpeakApps resources and

tools by running teacher training workshops.

Gaps that have come to light:Assessment and the CEFR

• Teachers wishing to use SpeakApps tasks and tools for assessment purposes, summative or formative or a combination of both.

• The CEFR proficiency levels are becoming increasingly relevant in assessment design to conform with national and institutional requirements:– registration with the Teaching Council – matriculation on postgraduate teaching-oriented courses.

• To ensure criterion-related validity of tasks an inventory of the forms, morpho-syntactic elements and phonetic and intonation skills needs to be prescribed to the various levels of the CEFR in Irish.

Gaps that have come to light:Task-Based Langue Learning and Task Creation

• Recognition in Irish language education sector on the value of tasks based learning, see Walsh & Nic Eoin (2010) and NCCA (2014).– Task-based learning should facilitate a learner’s current and

future communicative needs (Byram, 2008).

• Difficult to create valid tasks:– in the absence of a task-based needs analysis of the Irish

language sector.

Why the CEFR is important to creating tasks in the Irish language?

• An adaptation of the CEFR to Irish would:– illustrations of the type of language activities learners should be engaged

in– Illustrate principal domains in which the language is used would

underpin task creating• This, in turn, would:

– allow for better task creation– better use of the SpeakApps OER by Irish teachers– contribute to the growth in Irish language education

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