French

Staff Brian O’Rourke HOD Suzanne McCloskey/Aislinn Feighan  “Everyone can gain benefits from learning a language – cultural enrichment and the ability to communicate and interact confidently with people outside one’s own community.” (Tinsley,T. [2003] ‘Promoting languages in higher education:lessons from the European Year of Languages’)

 The study of a foreign language enhances a pupil’s personal and educational development in a variety of ways.

It may enable the student to:

• establish contact with people of their own age who speak other languages and to access information from other cultures;
• understand that experience of the world through another language can be just as ‘real’ and ‘valid’ as experience of the world through English;
• acquire an explicit understanding of what the components of language are and how these may be manipulated for different purposes;
• derive cognitive benefits through
  • problem-solving
  • memorisation
  • recall
  • making connections
  • attending to detail and pragmatic strategies.

All of these are basic transferable skills that may be activated or honed through a modern language.