The Department for Children, Young People, Education and Skills has recruited four full-time Jèrriais teachers to work in 11 primary schools and five secondary schools.
The programme includes both States and private schools and is being introduced as an extra-curricular activity, in the form of one half-hour lesson per week. The team are also offering a separate course of adult classes in key venues such as the Jersey Library.
Lessons are being taught on an ‘active and communicative’ basis, which places an emphasis on learning through speaking and, particularly in the case of younger students, playing games.
Jèrriais teacher Marianne Sargent said that her primary students are already responding well. ‘It’s a very communicative style of teaching,’ she said, ‘and we’re making sure that we make the children speak, and letting them have fun with it. In fact, only yesterday one of the boys in the class told us he didn’t realise it was going to be so much fun. We were pretty pleased with that.’
Aline Cattermole, who is teaching the language in the Island’s secondary schools, added that the lessons are also an opportunity to correct some misconceptions about Jèrriais. ‘Schools have been very supportive but we still need to promote Jèrriais, because it has suffered in the past from an image that it is a patois. But Jèrriais is a language in its own right, with its own written grammar, dictionaries and a rich literature.’
Assistant Education Minister Montfort Tadier said: ‘Taking it back one step, there’s a fundamental question of whether we just want to preserve Jèrriais as a museum piece or whether we want it to be a vibrant language that is spoken and appreciated relatively widely. I certainly favour the latter.
‘We have fairly high ambitions for the language and would like, to an extent, to see it alongside other languages like Welsh or Manx or Breton. But in order to achieve this, it has to be taught from a relatively young age.’
The teaching programme is part of the wider language plan that the Jèrriais Advisory Group is working on. The core tenets of the plan are to increase the number of speakers through lessons for children and adults, to raise the profile of the language by making it more visible around the Island, and to provide opportunities for people to use the language by planning community activities and events.
The JAG includes representatives of the States, the Superintendent Registrar, representatives from Le Don Balleine, l’Office du Jèrriais, the new Jèrriais teachers, Jersey Heritage, the National Trust and the Société Jersiaise.
