Gemma Fraser: Gaelic medium school is flying the flag for benefits of bilingual learning

A SIDE from being able to offer milk and sugar in a cup of tea and ask someone how they are - "ciamar a tha thu?" - the only thing I took away from my foray into the Gaelic language 14 years ago was a frustration that I had to give up without ever achieving my goal of becoming fluent in the language.

Armed with only a phrase book and cassette tape 20 years out of date borrowed from the local library, it wasn't the best way to pick up a language that was all but extinct in my home town of Dumfries.

Things are a lot different now, though. While I'm not sure that schools in south-west Scotland will ever fully embrace Gaelic, schools in other parts of Scotland, including Edinburgh and Glasgow, have made massive commitments to teaching the language to children.

In the Capital, the Gaelic Medium Education (GME) unit in Tollcross Primary is bursting at the seams, with pupil numbers rising from 90 to 132 in the past five years.

It has become so popular, in fact, that the council is looking into creating a dedicated Gaelic school so it can reach out to even more children interested in taking up the language.

While that might sound like a sensible and practical solution to dealing with increased demand, the proposal has come under fire given the costs involved and the fact that the council has already closed seven schools in less than two years.

Again and again the question is asked: "Why spend vast amounts of money on a dying language?"

With only one per cent of Scots speaking the language, it's a valid point, but the Scottish Government is firmly behind preserving this part of our heritage, while supporters of the language are increasingly pointing towards the general educational benefits of being bilingual.

A glowing HMIE report has just highlighted the great academic success of children at Tollcross Primary, where "a significant proportion achieve national levels in English, Gaelic and mathematics earlier than might normally be expected". It adds: "Children learning through the medium of Gaelic progress very well."

Antonella Sorace, professor of developmental linguistics at Edinburgh University and director of the new information service Bilingualism Matters, says: "The results are consistent with research on child bilingualism, which shows that growing up with two languages brings a range of benefits to children. For example, bilingual children tend to display improved attention and an enhanced ability to deal with complex information, have better metalinguistic skills and are more efficient language learners."

Tollcross Primary, which has the biggest Gaelic medium unit within a mainstream school in Scotland, had its largest ever Gaelic intake of P1 pupils this year.

While the benefits of speaking more than one language are clear, the issue of ploughing money into Gaelic instead of modern languages is more contentious, especially when the Tollcross unit costs an extra 460,000 a year to run on top of mainstream school costs.

Liz Smith MSP, the Tory's Scottish education spokeswoman, points to the benefits of learning Mandarin, for instance, due to the massive potential of the increasingly powerful Chinese economy. "Languages are extremely important and there's a debate going on just now not just about language teaching but about which languages we should be teaching," she says.

Edinburgh University research shows that even just learning another language in school, as opposed to being bilingual, can have a huge impact on a child's learning. Higher test scores, greater confidence, more advanced reading skills and a greater grasp of their first language are all said to come hand in hand with language learning.

Primary schools across the country are doing their bit to promote the benefits of acquiring a second language, with pupils expected to start learning one no later than P6.

David Fleming, headteacher of Dalry Primary, where 60 per cent of pupils are bilingual or multilingual, says: "As far as I'm concerned, children should be learning languages in nursery. I would love to be able to do that but we don't have the funding for it.

"Speaking different languages seems to have a beneficial impact on children as their brain connections are much more fluid. When you look at our attainment records, the multilingual children are doing really well.

"It's like building a house. If you have one other language, whatever that is, it's far easier to learn other languages and the benefits are wonderful."