French to be taught at Irishtown Primary School

The Ministry of Education intends to make the Irishtown Primary School the School of Linguistics, and will be offering French when the new academic year begins in September. The aim is also to have other languages taught there eventually.

During InFocus on Wednesday, Permanent Secretary Lisa Pistana spoke of the plans.

“For those of you who are joining us and new to the Irishtown Primary School, I say welcome. It’s a wonderful school. We have a lot in store for this institution. Come September, I think the minister has made no secret, it’s going to become the School of Linguistics. There’s a large Spanish-speaking population, so therefore we know readily on campus you have Spanish speakers, but we are looking at other languages like French and like Mandarin… Now, everything isn’t going to start at once. I don’t want the public to think “Come September, you’re gonna hear Mandarin being taught at the school.” We are hoping that we can start with French, simply because it’s something that we’ve piloted before and we know that it works. We have individuals who have the necessary experience. We just recently hired a curriculum officer for the modern languages and that person is gamed to help us to build out our vision for the Irishtown Primary school.”

She said this in an effort to develop the population to have the capacity for linguistic jobs in areas such as Tourism.

“Outside of that, we need to make sure that we are, as I’ve said before, forward thinking. We are a tourism based, or have a tourism based industry. We are service oriented, where persons are coming in from many different countries. Therefore, our natives must have an opportunity to vie for some of those jobs that will be created because of that. Hence, they must have an appreciation for modern languages. And so, that is something that we are in space and ready to do, come September. So we’ll be working.”

The new school year begins on Sept. 4.