Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 8 July 2021
226. Deputy Bríd Smith asked the Minister for Education if she will request the State Examinations Commission to conduct a review, re-evaluation and a full clarification in terms of the marking standard and the decision to exclude the use of traditional Chinese in leaving certificate Mandarin Chinese in 2022; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [36957/21]
View answerLeaving Certificate subject specifications are developed by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) in line with prevailing government policy on curriculum and assessment. The development process is a thorough one involving extensive consultation, following which the subject specification is approved through the representative structures of the NCCA and subsequently approved by my Department. The State Examinations Commission then implements examinations in line with the subject specification and the overall policy framework.
The Leaving Certificate Mandarin Chinese specification was designed as an ab initio course, in the sense that the targeted learners are Irish or international students with no previous knowledge of the language. While heritage speakers are certainly allowed to study the course and sit the exam, the specification is not designed for them. As a result of this design intent, traditional characters are not covered by the specification and, in line with this, candidates must respond to the questions on the examination paper using the simplified characters. The inclusion of traditional characters is not suitable for a specification pitched at ab initio level.
Mandarin Chinese is one of four new language specifications being introduced in line with Languages Connect - Ireland’s Strategy for Foreign Languages in Education 2017-2026 . All of these new language specifications broadly align with the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR). In CEFR, there is an EU project called European Benchmarking Chinese Language (EBCL) to incorporate the Chinese language into the CEFR framework. It may be noted that this benchmark itself did not incorporate traditional characters. The potential use of traditional characters as part of the Leaving Certificate subject specification was considered at design stage, and the decision to base the reading and writing aspects of the specification on simplified characters only was a conscious one, for the reasons outlined above. If the design had instead been such as to encompass both sets of characters, the differences in the two forms of characters would also have had implications for vocabulary, syntax, language use and potentially culture as well. This would present great challenges across teaching, learning and assessment, which would also have impacts on Higher Education language programmes and Initial Teacher Education.
The State Examinations Commission is required to conduct its examinations in a manner that is faithful to the approved subject specification developed by the NCCA and in line with assessment policy as set out by my Department. For the reasons above, I have no plans at this time to ask the State Examinations Commission to conduct a review or re-evaluation of the marking standards to be applied in Leaving Certificate Mandarin Chinese in 2022, or of the requirement on candidates to use simplified Chinese characters in the examination.
