Education in Ireland. The English language – a Door into the Future of your Children
All parents want to give their children a better life, but this all depends on the amount of choices they have in life. It’s no secret that the amount of choices largely depends on education and the ability to use this education so as to get more money than you originally invested in your education.
It’s obvious that the amount of places you can live in will determine the amount of opportunities you will have to apply your skills and knowledge. For example, 300 million people world wide speak Russian (including those who speak Russian as their second language), but five times more people speak English (not counting the one billion students that are learning English) and it’s the native language of 12 countries around the world.
The use of the English as an international language in the computer industry, diplomacy, international businesses, media, aviation and maritime transport shows us the importance of this language. Comparing the quality of life in Russia and English speaking countries in Western Europe, including Ireland, along with North America, Australia and New Zealand, you can earn a better living in the latter.
Accordingly, even a very prestigious education received in, for example, Russian or Poland, significantly reduces the amount of places where you can apply that knowledge. That’s why now, all over the world, there is a growing interest in obtaining an education in English speaking countries, primarily in Ireland.
So why is there such an interest in Ireland? Well because, just after the demonstration of Ireland’s rapid economic growth, which began in the last decade of the 20th century, everyone remembered the age-old traditions and quality of Irish education. An important role in this was played by the minimal cost of such an education, in comparison with countries that have worked in the education market for a long time.
Now let us shed some light on the actual education. Everyone knows that the best education is higher level education. But obtaining higher level education in English, for those people who don’t have it as their native language, it’s difficult to study it up to the level required so as to get into an Irish University.
But even after spending a whole year (after graduating from a Russian secondary school) in an English speaking country preparing for taking the required exams in English, it’s still quite possible to fail them. So what’s the solution?
There are two ways to do this. The first solution is to continue learning the language in your home country, then try to pass this difficult exam. The second solution is to start learning the language in a secondary school to which the language you are learning is native. In our future posts, we’ll talk about the pros and cons of the first solution, but today we’ll talk about the second one.
Here are the pros and cons of the second solution. We’ll start with the pros. The main advantage of this solution is that while you are studying English in a country that speaks English you learn to speak the language not only through study but through day to day communication.
It’s like comparing, for example, studying Tolstoy’s novel ‘War and Peace,’ while under pressure in school, or reading the novel by your own free will and being able to enjoy it. The way that you perceive the novel will be different in both of these scenarios.
The same goes for learning any language, not just English. When we are forced to learn the language, it makes learning it very hard and we start to ‘resist.’ But when we see the language being applied all around us, we stop noticing it and it’s ‘absorbed’ naturally. Also, when studying English grammar in countries that speak English, you mainly learn it by reading English literature and writing essays, reports etc in English, rather than just trying to study it all.
It’s believed that reading English literature shows you the correct use of English grammar. This type of studying is said to help people memorise entire set phrases in their correct grammatical from. We have rarely encountered this type of learning, but have found that this unusual approach actually works!
We will continue talking about our thoughts on the topic of learning English in Ireland in our next post!
