Irish Colleges
Irish colleges are residential Irish language summer courses that give students the opportunity to be totally immersed in the language, usually for periods of three weeks over the summer months. During these courses students attend classes and participate in a variety of different activities games, music, art and sport. Not only do these courses provide students with the ability to improve their language skills but they have also proved to be a vehicle for introducing traditional cultural activities (céilís, Irish traditional music etc.) to a new generation.
As with the conventional school set-up The Department of Education establishes the boundaries for class size and qualifications required by teachers. Some courses are college based and others are based with host families in Gaeltacht areas such as Ros Muc in Galway and Ráth Cairn in County Meath, Coláiste Cill Chartha in County Donegal receiving instruction from a bean an tí, or Irish-speaking landlady.
Read more about this topic: Gaeltacht
Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or colleges:
“The difference of the English and Irish character is nowhere more plainly discerned than in their respective kitchens. With the former, this apartment is probably the cleanest, and certainly the most orderly, in the house.... An Irish kitchen ... is usually a temple dedicated to the goddess of disorder; and, too often, joined with her, is the potent deity of dirt.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)