Member Profile: Bríd Lin

Despite its popularity, Duolingo has notable limitations compared with live online instruction. Technology can open access and build foundational skills for Irish learners, but it cannot replace the socially-embedded interaction of successful language learning. Recent research strongly suggests that Duolingo is most effective as a supporting tool rather than a standalone solution. App-based learning cannot provide the corrective feedback and sociolinguistic engagement of class instruction, conversation sessions, workshops or book club meetings.

Sometimes referred to as the “Irish Chekhov,” Brian Friel is considered by many to be one of the greatest playwrights of his generation, in both Ireland and abroad. During the five decades that spanned his career, his work demonstrated not only daring artistic approaches, but also a wide range of topics addressed. From political activism to family dynamics, Friel’s plays took chances in form and content, making him a pioneer of his day. Additionally, because his plays were often set in rural towns and his career spanned over half a century, it is often remarked that his work embodied the evolution of the Irish countryside in the 20th century.

Máirtín Ó Díreáin is credited, along with his contemporaries Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, for breathing new life into Irish language modernist poetry. While other writers of the Gaelic Revival took up older and more structured forms of verse, often those developed in Ireland centuries ago that involved strict meter, Ó Díreáin instead preferred to write in a metered free verse. While also grounded in the Irish tradition of poetry, he still looked to other culture’s poets for influence, one of which he often alluded to being T.S. Eliot. Additionally, while other revivalist poets used an older, more classical style of language, Ó Díreáin wrote in the modern Irish that he grew up speaking on the islands.