JERSEY’S proposed new town primary could be a “dual-language school” teaching pupils in English, and French and Jèrriais, a leading expert in minority languages has suggested.
Professor Colin Williams, senior research associate at St Edmund’s College Cambridge and a member of the Welsh Language Board, said that such schools were good for social cohesion and provided “a very sophisticated approach to language transmission”.
In the Island at the invitation of L’Office du Jèrriais, Prof Williams suggested that Jersey could introduce an initiative which has been successful in Wales, Catalunia, Andorra and in the Basque country.
“These are neighbourhood schools and the children from the local area all attend the same school but they can be streamed by choice. You would have the default English language stream with a mixture of French and Jèrriais offered, but a second stream might be more heavily devoted to French and Jèrriais as the national, historical languages of the Island. A larger proportion of the teaching would use either – or both – French and Jèrriais as a medium of instruction for things like history, geography, environmental studies, ecology and local studies.
“If these streams are well established and the parents feel sufficiently confident that their children can cope with the French and Jèrriais stream, they might choose to switch their children from an English dominant stream to what might be called a Romance dominant stream,” he explained, adding that as a safety measure it would be possible for children to switch back to the English dominant stream if they were not able to cope.
“With a school which is effectively trilingual, then whatever the children’s strengths are can be reflected at home; parents aren’t anxious about their children’s development; or having them separated out as ‘special interest freaks’, as Welsh children used to be called. It reduces social tension and increases social cohesion.
“It’s value-added and therefore an enrichment, and I see it as part of cognitive development of young children that they are introduced to an Anglo-Saxon and a Romance language structure which gives them two visions of the world. In principle, it gives you a treasure you can build on,” he said.
Ben Spink, head of the Jèrriais service, responded with interest to Prof Williams’s suggestion that the new town primary school, which could be built on the former Jersey Gas site off Tunnell Street, might provide the opportunity for such an approach.
“It is a relatively new concept for us. I first heard about it at a conference and I was intrigued about it then, and I’ve been very glad to learn more about the concept as a result of Colin being here,” Mr Spink said.
Prof Williams, who met the Jèrriais teaching team and gave a public talk at the Société Jersiaise during his visit, said that while the situation in Wales – where there are between 520,000 and 920,000 speakers – was very different, the challenge of transforming learners of Jèrriais into daily speakers was the same.
He also suggested that with the support of the government “spaces for language exchange” could be created to provide environments that encouraged learners to speak.
“They would be Jèrriais centres, or spaces where Jèrriais would be the natural default language of that space,” he explained, adding that they could be established by the government or with support from private bodies or perhaps sponsorship.
“The challenge is how to ‘mainstream’ the interests of those learning the language into government thinking as a public good and not as a special interest; to make the case that the language belongs to all,” Prof Williams said.
