Department of Education and Skills, Ireland (PPLI: Post-Primary Languages Ireland)
HARADA Akiko

As you all know, Ireland includes Northern Ireland, which is territory of the UK. While peace came to the region with the cessation of hostilities after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the border has become a source of problems again now that the UK has left the EU. The movement of people and goods is free within the EU, but with Brexit, various procedures have become necessary. I myself had the occasion to cross the border several times, and the only thing that changed was that the road signs changed from kilometers to miles, giving no sense that I was now in a different country. As I keep my eye on the future developments of the EU and the UK, I pray that a better solution is found.

To continue, there were many changes this year at the organization I actually work at, Post Primary Languages Ireland (hereinafter “PPLI”). This includes a more than doubled increase in staffing, a new name and website, and will move to new offices next July. My main job, generally speaking, is to promote and support the spread of foreign language education. To do this, I speak out to a wide variety of channels using social media, plan and host numerous events and seminars, run teacher training, and prepare promotional pamphlets. Among the staff hired at PPLI, there are also teachers of other languages such as Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Korean, so at the moment I am also working on the major task of preparing their schedules. In some cases, each teacher may be covering three or four schools, so this work is somewhat like putting together a puzzle with the timetables of the different schools serving as the pieces.

In 2018, I launched Japan Quiz Night, an event for first year students in secondary school - Senior Cycle, and in 2019, I added two oral workshops for third year students immediately prior to their tests. While there are no university entrance exams in Ireland, as there are in Japan, there are graduation tests for each subject at the end of secondary school - Senior Cycle instead, called the Leaving Certificate, and the test for foreign languages involves not only writing, listening, and composition, but an oral exam as well. Many of the students find the oral test most difficult, a point on which many teachers have sought help over. In response, I created a program with the help of Japanese exchange students at the Dublin City University for students in secondary school - Senior Cycle to practice the test repeatedly under conditions that recreate the tests. The two sessions were attended by about 50 students each and were a great success. We also held a Japan Week event for Transition Year (TY) in which attendees could experience Japanese culture such as the Kendo martial art, Shodo calligraphy, Origami paper crafts, J-Pop, and wearing Kimonos. While the majority of students were male, they all showed great interest throughout.

In Ireland, there are almost no private Japanese schools, so the only places to study Japanese are secondary school - Senior Cycle and university. However, perhaps influenced by the Rugby World Cup, several introductory classes have been opened recently at local community schools called “Further Education Institutes.” I visited one of the schools to give lectures on the Japanese language and culture. All of the students attending the lectures were working adults, and there were also two couples who wanted to learn a bit of Japanese before attending the World Cup this fall. The students particularly enjoyed when I used documents related to the World Cup to have the students think of schedules and country names to introduce numbers and Katakana. Ireland is in the Pool A qualifying round, together with Japan, so there were students who managed to guess some of the country names without being able to read Katakana. Seeing that, I realized that leveraging your existing knowledge and using guessing are both important elements in language learning, and that therefore, learning through fun games was particularly effective for learners at the starter and beginner levels.

The Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme (for Assistant Language Teachers) is now in its 33rd year, and has become a major program involving over 50 countries and 5,500 participants. Ireland has long participated in the program, sending students to Japan every year since the program’s second year. Japanese-Language Specialists are involved in the document screening and interview process for applicants, and also run the Japanese language workshop for the seminar held for them immediately prior to departure. This year, it was decided to hold a weekly Japanese language course to further improve the Japanese language skills of participants for the two month period covering June and July. I am currently preparing for those courses with the hope that these participants can improve their Japanese ability even a little bit and serve as a bridge between Ireland and Japan.