THE ROLE OF THE WELSH LANGUAGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN WALES
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In sociolinguistics, bilingualism is regarded as the coexistence of a majority and a minority language in a given speech community, whose members use the respective languages in various social contexts according to the speech act parameters and the collective norms and values, whereas bilingual education is defined as the use of two languages as media of instruction with the goal of achieving proficiency in both languages. In all minority languages, there are families who use the majority language with their children. If this occurs across successive generations, the language will rapidly decline. If families fail to reproduce such languages in children, second and higher language education has to attempt to make up the shortfall. Welsh and English are the two major linguistic and ethnic traditions in Wales. During the last half century, a revival of interest in the language has been reflected in the growth and development of Welsh-medium education that has provided an opportunity for new generations to become Welsh speakers.Welsh-medium education is available from primary school through to higher education, and the 1998 Education Reform Act ensured that Welsh is taught in almost all Welsh schools either as a first or a second language. The present article focuses on the role of the Welsh language in higher education institutions in Wales. The Welsh Government is committed to giving the Welsh language the same status as English in every aspect of life. Welsh (Cymraeg) is a Celtic language spoken in Wales and in the Welsh colony (yr Wladfa) in Patagonia, Argentina. There are also Welsh speakers in England, Scotland, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. The language spoken today is a direct descendant of Early Welsh, which emerged as a distinct tongue around the 6th century AD, and its literary tradition extends to this time when it was the language not only of Wales, but also of large parts of southern Scotland and northern England. Welsh is available as a degree course in various forms at most Welsh universities. In these institutions it is possible to combine the study of Welsh with another language or subject in a joint honours degree. There are increasing opportunities to study through the medium of Welsh for all or part of a degree course. The ability to speak Welsh is becoming increasingly important when looking for employment. So if a person can speak Welsh he or she should seriously consider maintaining his or her language skills and making it a part of learning and career development plan. Employers prefer to recruit people with a good level of Welsh, especially those who have taken courses through the medium of Welsh.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".