Cymraeg+

 After the Welsh in the Workplace program the University has, which encourages well you learning employees to develop their skills in using Welsh as a work language, the University had thought of something new. It was a very small scale project for supporting the Welsh teaching of Welsh learning teaching staff. Jenny head told me about it, and asked if I was interested. Of course I had said yes. And I was admitted under the program. I understood there were four of us on it. And I had seen all the other faces before, of course; you tend to keep bumping into each other if you learn Welsh at a similar level.

The first thing that happened was that I had a chat with Siân, who had supported me through my Welsh language teaching qualification. We discussed what sort of support would work for me, and in what way I envisioned it. She also spoke with everybody else. I said I had been making teaching material in Welsh, and could really do with a bit of help. I also figured that doing a bit of teaching practice to a supportive community might help with just building up a bit of experience and therefore confidence.

She immediately took me up on my suggestion for help with teaching materials. What I have been putting online for my first official Welsh teaching has all been checked by her!

After a while I heard that the University has decided to hire a retired teacher for a few hours a week (or something) to support us. And on a very slippery day in December, we had our first meeting!

This meeting was a bit overstaffed; apart from me, the only other person who was there who was participating in the program was Bid, from Forestry. We were supposed to have Ross from Sports Science too, but he couldn't come for reasons of Covid. I wasn't sure why the other two I had expected were not there. Maybe something to do with the atrocious conditions on the road?

On the other side of the program we had Jenny, and Siân, and Rhian-Mair, the lady who had been specifically hired for this. So Bid and I had an excellent opportunity to exchange thoughts with all three of them!

We made a bit of a plan for the coming months. One of the first things to happen is that we just introduce an aspect of our field of expertise to each other. Given that we are all in different schools, this will be interesting! And we are also expected to go and observe lessons by native speakers.

I suppose we will develop the program further as time goes by, and we get input from the people who couldn't make this meeting. And I expect to get a clearer idea of my needs as in the new semester, Ocean Sciences will welcome its new Welsh medium lecturer Molly, and I intend to make the dissertation module bilingual with her. I could imagine I will need a bit support with that as well!