Can apps make a difference to how well children learn Welsh in schools?

Aran Jones Author, SaySomethingIn

In the academic year 2023/2024, the Ninian Park cluster of primary schools in Cardiff was given access to the SaySomethinginWelsh app. The results were analysed by a PhD student at Cardiff University, Peter Russell, and his analysis tells a fascinating story.

From class to class, use of the app varied from 5 minutes a week to 5 minutes a day – the project wasn’t funded, so there wasn’t as much support and training for the teachers as we would have liked to see – but the results were startling.

When the children were tested, they were compared against results for classes that had only followed the national curriculum, and classes that had followed the Central South Consortium approach.

[Sidebar: for questionnaire methodology geeks, it’s important to note that the different groups were tested on the different content they had covered.]

Even the classes that had only done 5 minutes a week with SaySomethinginWelsh saw a striking improvement.

You can see the details in the report, but if you think of it as a bar chart, almost all the students in the classes without SaySomethinginWelsh scored in the bottom quarter on the test, while half the students who had used SSiW scored in the top quarter.

In other words, even in classes that only did 5 minutes a week, about half the students suddenly started doing extremely well when they had access to the SaySomethinginWelsh app.

Welsh teacher shortage

In one way or another, I’ve been involved in education all my professional life.

I’ve never heard of another academic intervention which triggered such a difference in results in such a small amount of time. [If anybody could show me one, I’d absolutely love to see it.]

That’s not the only exciting factor, though.

One of the biggest challenges facing the government in their drive to improve results in English medium schools is the availability of Welsh-speaking teachers.

But in our trials, there was anecdotal evidence that the teachers who sat down and played the game with their students saw better class results.

In other words, it might be possible for children to do better at this early stage of the learning journey if their teacher is learning with them, instead of already being a confident Welsh speaker.

Gobaith

The third remarkable insight – based on anecdotal input from the teachers – was that some of the children who suddenly started doing very well were not the children usually expected to be academically strong.

In other words, some children who were used to not doing very well at school were discovering that they could learn successfully, in a subject usually seen as difficult.

The psychological impact this could have is mouth-watering.

If we can show children that they are capable of learning successfully – children who’ve already started to doubt that – the impact could be dramatic, and far wider than just a single subject.

There are two reasons for caution, though.

The polarising effect between top quarter and bottom quarter students showed some signs of becoming stronger over time. This makes sense – if you’re not engaged at the beginning of the SaySomethinginWelsh app, it becomes harder over time, until it will be difficult to catch up without individual work.

This suggests that even better results could be achieved if we could build a way for students to be able to do individual catch-up sessions until they reach the same level as the class. We don’t currently have the functionality for this in the app, but we could add it if further trials were funded.

The other reason for caution is that this was a comparatively small study, and it’s just not possible to be certain that a larger study would lead to similar results.

Cognitive advantages

It certainly looks as though it would be a very good idea for a larger study to be done, though. This first study has shown exciting potential.

Based on what we’ve seen in Cardiff, if primary students from Year 4 onwards did 10 minutes a day consistently with SaySomethinginWelsh, we would expect them to be very strong A2 on the Common European Framework Reference for languages by the time they reached secondary school (and some of them might even be achieving B1 in their spoken Welsh).

This would make the government’s goal of B2 for all students by GCSE look eminently within reach.

If that can be achieved at the same time as increasing levels of confidence for all students in ways that spill over into other subjects, we could be on the verge of seeing learning Welsh become a unique educational advantage in all the schools of Wales.

We’ve known for a long time that bilingualism gives a wide range of cognitive advantages.

It’s high time those advantages were shared with all of our children.

Find out more about SaySomethingIn here.

The Cardiff study: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174145/