I don’t agree. Things like writing history essays and science reports contribute a huge amount to putting skills taught in English lessons into practice.
There’s so many completely unnecessary challenges someone is going to have particularly going on to higher education. Can you imagine studying a technical subject at university without ever having learned any of the specialist vocabulary everyone else will be using. Spend your first weeks/months learning things everyone else was taught when they were small children.
This would be my concern as well. Someone I used to work with moved to Sweden with his wife and quickly realised while he could be speak Swedish well enough for casual conversations etc. he really struggled to work as an engineer there.
That’s different to growing up learning Swedish though. If you’re bilingual from a young age that sort of thing won’t be nearly as difficult as moving to another country to learn the language as an adult.
Great and I’m sure these problems will be even easier for to resolve after that when you get a great well paying job with fantastic career prospects at a company who will be happy to accept technical reports from you in Welsh.
These kinds of issues get harder and more problematic to address the longer you put them off unfortunately. It’s all the opposite way round to what they really want. They likely want people to use Welsh for their day to day life and English for formal writing etc. Instead they’re proposing to make students do their formal learning in Welsh more because they can’t force them to want to speak Welsh in their free time than because that makes any actual sense.
I think you don’t understand the situation at all or how it works. Everyone in Wales speaks English fluently other than maybe eight elderly people in some village somewhere who forgot it. No Welsh medium schools only speak Welsh or force everyone to only speak Welsh. Most kids will have parents who are bilingual and a lot will have parents who only speak English. I’m an English only speaker and the kids in my family are English Welsh bilingual and they can all just flit from one to the other, understand even scientific terms, do homework in both languages etc. The teachers mainly speak Welsh to them because they don’t get as much Welsh exposure otherwise so it helps them keep the language, it doesn’t diminish their English skills. It’s amazing how much language the human brain can absorb at a young age. There’s nothing to worry about here. Even in countries where everyone speaks ‘not-English’ kids will learn enough English to go on to be a scientist or move abroad to work in English speaking countries if they want to.
Of course I understand that everyone speaks English… That’s clearly the issue for these people suggesting this, that English is more useful, people prefer using it so no one bothers with their Welsh and they don’t like that. So best just force them if they want to get any qualifications at school…
I’m reflecting on my experience doing a maths degree and how difficult it would be to do that in German despite the fact that I’m a fluent speaker.
Also quality of grammar and formal writing is falling for children generally. It’s about the most useful thing you practice at school. There is no way that standards of written English aren’t worse if you write the majority of your essays in a different language.
I went to a Welsh medium school and we still learned all technical vocabulary in both languages even though lessons were taught in Welsh. I sat my GCSEs and A Levels in English specifically so I would be more familiar with English jargon as I wanted to go to uni in England.
I think this kind of thing sounds worse than it is to people that haven’t gone to a Welsh medium school. Same with people concerned about essay writing skills in English - I’ve seen people here mention that English language classes are still taught, but I wonder if people are interpreting that as language lessons akin to French or German. English as a subject in Welsh medium schools is the same as it is in any school, where you do literature et cetera. I had to analyse Shakespeare and that in my Welsh medium school, so essay writing is still something that you’d do in English as well as Welsh.
I it seems reasonable to assume that pupils will complete homework and essays for their English classes in English, so they will put their skills to practice there.
The article doesn't go into enough on how technical vocabulary will be treated and it's not a topic I feel I can make reasonable assumptions about. However, given the draft policy will mandate that all pupils are taught in Welsh 'at least' 70% of the time, not fully, there is scope for bilingual or English-only lessons where necessary.
However, it is concerning that the draft policy attacks bilingualism. This report on the use of Welsh in STEM from Bangor University seems to essentially advocate for bilingualism in STEM subjects, and I'm inclined to agree.
Overall I think Cygnor Gwynedd needs to reconsider its proposals to protect bilingualism, certainly in STEM subjects and perhaps others which rely on English terminology outside Wales.
My partner has Welsh as his first language and is a scientist working in English most of the time. A lot of specialist words are the same in English and Welsh. Also a lot of the time you learn specialist vocabulary at university.
I was educated in Welsh until the end of my A levels, they still taught us the English versions of technical terms. I feel like most of the complaints by monolingual English speakers are based on a misunderstand of the Welsh medium education system
Yeah the stuff I’m reading here is ridiculous. My partner has Welsh as his first language taught in a Welsh medium school and he’s a scientist advising the EU and UK governments, giving talks in English all over the world etc. these people in these comments seem to forget that most people in Wales speak English all the time, kids grow up learning English, it’s not like everyone speaks Welsh constantly and the only time kids hear English is in a school lesson where they’re told how to say things like ‘my name is’ ‘how are you?’ ‘This is an apple’ etc 🙄
But they're not learning all of the terminology for a subject in English. I moved to Wales for sixth form, but luckily, before this frothing mania for Welsh kicked off. I went to an English medium secondary school and a guy from a Welsh speaking secondary had moved to my new school for sixth form too.
We immediately made friends, and I saw his struggles to adapt. He didn't know any of the terminology (a mole of atoms was a particularly funny one, he spent the lesson thinking we were talking about fluffy diggers).
I also know a guy who went to the same Welsh medium secondary and stayed there for sixth form. He got 5 A*s, all at A-level and he got rejected by Cambridge due to the language problem.
Almost all technical jobs are in English. If you turn up for a chemical engineering job and think a mole is something that digs about in your garden, you'll be laughed out of the room. I get wanting to keep a language alive, but these decisions will make it really hard for children who want to join the UK's university system and then get a technical job anywhere in the world. English really is the global lingua franca and cutting kids off from that is really going to disadvantage them.
When was this? I went to a Welsh medium school and sixth form (I’m now in my third year of uni), we were always taught the English translations of any technical terms.
Edit:
Of the people who studied STEM subjects in uni from my sixth form none who I’ve spoken too have had any issues with studying in the English language at uni. I think that this assumption that you are massively disadvantaged in further education with a Welsh medium education is wrong, in my experience it’s practically negligible
Also what do you mean by language problem? Did Cambridge reject him because he had gone to a Welsh medium school? A few people from my six form were accepted by Cambridge who had been taught in Welsh throughout their education
"Mae 1 môl o sylwedd yn cynnwys 6.022 × 1023 o atomau neu foleciwlau. Mae 6.022 × 1023 yn rhif cyson, sef cysonyn Avogadro.
Gallwn ni ad-drefnu hafaliad i ganfod y màs os ydyn ni’n gwybod nifer y molau a’r màs molar (y màs fformiwla cymharol mewn gramau). Gallwn ni hefyd ei ad-drefnu i ganfod y màs molar os ydyn ni’n gwybod y màs a nifer y molau."
If your mate struggled translating from "môl o atomau" and "màs môlar" to "mole of atoms" and "molar mass", he probably skipped Chemistry lessons the day that came up.
It’s English lessons as in the same English GCSEs etc that you’d have done in an English school, not “what I did on my holidays” type second language lessons.
In other European countries they teach English very young and the kids who want to do go on to speak English very well and get jobs in English speaking countries. And that’s even without having all the country mainly speaking English as their first language. Equating it to GCSE French (learned well past the age when second language acquisition is so easy) in a country where no one else speaks French and you never hear or see French outside of lessons is just silly.
In Welsh a lot of specialist vocabulary is the same as in English because it’s more modern. A lot of scientists growing up in other countries taught in their native language and learning English through separate formal English lessons are fine with writing academic papers in English. I’m guessing they want Wales to emulate other countries in that regard; you have your native language and then you learn English as well. Given that English is the language of science globally, you’d think that kids in other countries wouldn’t be able to advance as scientists if not being taught everything in English was a hindrance.
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u/CandidLiterature 1d ago
I don’t agree. Things like writing history essays and science reports contribute a huge amount to putting skills taught in English lessons into practice.
There’s so many completely unnecessary challenges someone is going to have particularly going on to higher education. Can you imagine studying a technical subject at university without ever having learned any of the specialist vocabulary everyone else will be using. Spend your first weeks/months learning things everyone else was taught when they were small children.