Speak Gaelic Independent Learning Support (360G-BNG-2324_3032)

This project is aimed at both staff and community members, and increasing their learning of Gaelic through weekly tutor support, monthly seminars and face-to-face singing/culture awareness. We are already committed to running the Speak Gaelic A1 programme for beginners in Angus, but we have far more interested beginners than we can support through a single class.  It isn’t practical or affordable to run more classes, and we know that the classes being free is a major pull in the current financial climate, so we would like to provide further support to Gaelic learners in Angus in a cost-effective way. In order to support the large number of Angus people who are very keen to learn Gaelic, we propose to set up a Speak Gaelic virtual hub in Angus to facilitate independent learning via the Speak Gaelic A1 programme.  We have found that people who start learning Gaelic independently, even if they are quite strongly motivated, can feel quite isolated, and struggle to maintain momentum when they hit problems.  The project would address this by tackling just one A1 topic per month, to give people the chance to really get to grips with each topic, practice what they have learned, and make use of as many of the resources as they can.  This would be achieved via weekly emails with suggestions for what to work on and including links to the radio, TV and other resources.  Once a month we would hold an online support seminar for the topic, where learners can get tips on the tricky parts as well as real-time support.  A closed Facebook group would be used to provide a safe environment for the learners to ask questions and use their Gaelic together, as well as through some face-to-face delivery.