Immersion Education

Lessons from a Minority Language Context

Pádraig Ó Duibhir

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781783099856
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

The body of research in this volume offers a detailed account of the success of young immersion learners of Irish in becoming competent speakers of the minority language. Taking account of in-class and out-of-class factors, it examines the variety of Irish spoken by the pupils, the extent to which the Irish spoken deviates from native-speaker norms, the degree to which pupils are aware of and attempt to acquire a native-like variety and the extent to which issues of identity and motivation are involved. The results highlight the limitations of an immersion system in generating active and accurate users of the language outside the immersion setting and will help immersion educators to gain a greater understanding of how young immersion learners learn and acquire the target language. The findings are placed in the context of other one-way immersion programmes internationally with a particular focus on minority language settings, and make an important contribution not only to our understanding of the Irish issues, but how the Irish situation can be placed in a broader scholarly and socio-political context.

1 Introduction

Setting the Context

The education system was given a central role in the Irish language revitalisation policy of the Irish Free State when it was founded in 1922. One of the key policy initiatives at that time was to introduce Irish-medium education wherever there were teachers qualified and competent to teach through the medium of Irish. The objective of this policy was to educate a bilingual generation of children who would go on to speak Irish and over time revitalise the Irish language. This early policy initiative has resulted in a long tradition of Irish-medium education in Ireland. There have been periods of growth and decline in the number of schools teaching through the medium of Irish during the intervening years. The last 40 years have seen a period of sustained growth in the number of all-Irish1 schools, driven in the main this time by parental demand rather than by state initiative. Currently, there are 43,130 (7.97%) primary pupils (aged 4–12 years) receiving their education through Irish in the Republic of Ireland (RoI) with a further 5,854 (3.41%) in Northern Ireland, giving an overall figure of 48,984 (6.87%) for the island of Ireland (www.gaelscoileanna.ie). The remainder of pupils attend mainstream English-medium schools and learn Irish as a core subject. This all-Irish school movement is viewed by many as one of the most positive enterprises in language promotion in the history of the state (Council of Europe, 2008). Despite this growth in interest and popularity, objective evidence about the proficiency in Irish of the pupils who participate in these programmes is sparse and the contribution of this movement in enhancing the number of people using Irish on a daily basis outside of the school environment has not been adequately explored.

Research findings from a number of studies by Harris (1984) and Harris et al. (2006) that focused on all-Irish primary school pupils demonstrated the very positive impact of Irish language immersion. These studies indicate that all-Irish pupils significantly outperform their peers in English-medium schools in terms of their ability in Irish. This is not surprising given that pupils in all-Irish schools are exposed to approximately 6000 hours’ instruction through the medium of Irish in primary school compared to just under 900 hours of Irish instruction in English-medium schools. Systematic investigation of immersion pupils’ Irish and the extent to which it approaches native speaker norms has been limited. Concern has been expressed from time to time about the non-target-like nature of pupils’ spoken Irish (Mac Corraidh, 2013; National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, 2006). It has been suggested that pupils speak a school dialect which is closer to English than Irish in syntactic terms (Nic Pháidín, 2003). The evidence, however, is largely anecdotal and it is not known to what extent the features of the pupils’ Irish are linked to immersion specifically or to the nature of the larger sociolinguistic context within which schools operate. Notwithstanding the non-target-like nature of the pupils’ Irish, there is evidence that immersion pupils achieve high levels of competence in Irish, at least compared to English-medium schools, by the end of their post-primary education (Murtagh, 2006) having participated in up to 14 years of an immersion programme. These outcomes mirror experiences in other immersion contexts, including dual-language contexts, throughout the world.

While one kind of Irish-medium school has been implicitly referred to, in reality it is necessary to distinguish between two types of Irish-medium school. The first type are Gaeltacht schools which exist solely in geographic bilingual areas where Irish is the community language for an ever-decreasing proportion of the population. These areas are mainly located along the western and south-western seaboard. The second type is all-Irish immersion schools outside the Gaeltacht where the vast majority of pupils have English as their home language. All-Irish schools are located outside the Gaeltacht areas and the vast majority of pupils are monolingual English speakers when they start school. The programme provided in all-Irish schools can be described as early immersion, where the pupils are immersed in Irish, their second language (L2), from their first day in school. It is the language acquisition of the pupils in this latter type of Irish-medium school outside the Gaeltacht that is the principal focus of this volume. English dominates the lives of these pupils and their contact with Irish is largely confined to the school. Their sociolinguistic background is similar in many respects to that of French immersion pupils in Canada or to Gaelic immersion pupils in Scotland.

A number of comprehensive studies of the Gaeltacht in Ireland have shown that these areas are becoming increasingly bilingual and that the number of native Irish-speaking children in Gaeltacht schools has declined (Mac Donnacha et al., 2005). There are also fewer families in Gaeltacht areas transmitting the language to the next generation (Ó Giollagáin et al., 2007; Ó hIfearnáin, 2007; Péterváry et al., 2014). Ó hÉallaithe (2010) estimated that 2326 (30%) such families were transmitting Irish to their children and Ó Broin (2014) suggested that there might be up to 600 families outside the Gaeltacht raising their children through Irish. The potential language revitalisation role played by all-Irish schools is all the more critical in light of this lack of transmission. This is not to suggest that former pupils of all-Irish schools are the only source of competent bilinguals. Other schools, comprising over 90% of all schools, have a critical role to play also. As Ó Riagáin (1997) argued, the education system in general in Ireland and the immersion schools in particular need to produce substantial numbers of competent bilinguals to compensate for the insufficient rate of intergenerational transmission. However, producing competent bilinguals does not necessarily guarantee language revitalisation (Baker, 2006) as linguistic competence may not transfer beyond the classroom. Experience over the last 90 years in Ireland bears this out where Irish, learned in a classroom, is not used widely in everyday life nor is there evidence of an increase in intergenerational transmission.

The government’s 20-Year Strategy for Irish (Government of Ireland, 2010) recognises the roles of capacity, opportunity and desire (Grin, 2003) to speak Irish in its revitalisation efforts. These three interacting factors underpin the studies reported in this volume. Education contexts tend to address language capacity or competency, but have limited influence on opportunity and desire. In investigating all-Irish pupil competence, I am very aware that opportunities for pupils to use Irish outside the school context impact, not only on their future use of Irish, but also on their desire to learn and use Irish in the present. There is some evidence that all-Irish schools are successful ‘in introducing students to Irish language-speaking networks that facilitate maintenance and use of Irish after they leave school’ (Murtagh, 2007: 450). The fact that all-Irish schools are producing increasing numbers of competent bilinguals gives them a potentially critical role in the revitalisation of Irish (Harris, 2007).

An important issue arising from this level of success in producing competent bilinguals is the extent to which the Irish language skills acquired by these pupils prepare them for participation in the Irish language speech community (Ó Laoire, 2000). The greater the level of competence that pupils have in speaking Irish, the greater the likelihood that they will participate in Irish-speaking networks in the future (Ó Riagáin et al., 2007). This was borne out in the latest survey of attitudes towards the Irish language where those with higher proficiency levels in Irish were more likely to speak Irish (Darmody & Daly, 2015). For those who go on to participate in Irish-speaking networks and to set up Irish-speaking families, a high standard of Irish is critical in my view because these speakers have the potential to influence the evolving character of the language. If one subscribes to the view that new speakers of Irish and native speakers need to be mutually intelligible, then opportunities for new speakers to acquire a more native-like form are diminishing due to the decline in the number of native speakers.

An alternative view is that the Irish language may evolve to a post-traditional form, a pidgin or simplified variety may emerge. Research in other jurisdictions has compared immersion pupils’ language with that of native speakers, for example, Basque (Cenoz & Gorter, 2017), French (Lyster, 2007), Swedish (Buss, 2002) and Welsh (Thomas & Gathercole, 2007). The evidence suggests that immersion schools tend to produce speakers who speak a ‘school code’ that deviates from native speaker norms. If this is the case in Ireland, it is likely that the variety of Irish spoken by these new speakers will be different from traditional speakers of the language and the authenticity of this variety will be contested unless it replaces the traditional variety in the future (Romaine, 2006). Indeed, evidence is emerging of new speakers of Irish who hold negative views of their fluency and this inhibits their use of Irish especially with more proficient speakers or native speakers (Walsh & O’Rourke, 2015).

Aims of this Volume

The principal aim of this volume is to synthesise a number of studies that I undertook alone or with colleagues which examine the proficiency in Irish of pupils in all-Irish schools and the attitudes of pupils, their parents and their teachers to proficiency and language use inside and outside the classroom. The studies were carried out over an eight-year period from 2007 to 2014 and are described in detail in Chapter 4. Briefly, the first two studies were corpus-based studies of all-Irish primary school pupil speech. The first study I undertook was in the RoI and the second extended this research with the assistance of a colleague, Jill Garland, to Northern Ireland. In these studies, I recorded immersion pupils spoken language, surveyed their attitudes to learning and using Irish and interviewed their teachers to ascertain their attitudes to the pupils’ linguistic proficiency. Anecdotal evidence indicated that the Irish spoken by all-Irish pupils contains many non-target-like features. A comprehensive analysis of the pupils’ Irish would help to establish if this is the case and to inform teachers of precisely which features are not being mastered after almost eight years of immersion. There are many factors that potentially contribute to a lack of grammatical accuracy in pupils’ speech, including the nature of the immediate immersion context, the pupils’ attitude and motivation to learn Irish, their lack of exposure to Irish outside the school and the pedagogical approach adopted in schools. In order to gain insights into these issues, the first two studies reported in this volume set out to compile a corpus of all-Irish pupils’ speech and to analyse it.

In the third study, I investigated the attitudes of French immersion teachers towards the proficiency in French of their students in Grades 6–8 in Toronto and Ottawa and compared these to the views of Irish immersion primary schoolteachers. In the fourth study, I examined, with colleagues Gabrielle NigUidhir, Seán Ó Cathalláin and Laoise Ní Thuairisg, the attitudes and motivation of primary and post-primary all-Irish students to Irish and their use of Irish outside the classroom. I also sought to establish the degree to which their parents used Irish with the pupils. In synthesising these studies and drawing on other sources in the research literature, this volume offers the reader an in-depth description of the current state of Irish language proficiency in immersion education in Ireland and places the findings in the context of other one-way immersion programmes internationally with a particular focus on minority language settings. Such a description does not currently exist, so this volume will help to inform future teacher education strategies and provide a valuable resource to immersion teachers, teacher education students, graduate students and second language acquisition (SLA) researchers both nationally and internationally.

The creation of a corpus of Irish immersion pupil language and its subsequent analysis identifies for teachers the aspects of Irish that will not be acquired implicitly by pupils without explicit attention to form. Immersion programmes are often promoted to parents as delivering ‘two for one’. The implied message being that an L2 is acquired as content is taught through the L2 and at no cost to first language (L1) attainment. While there is some truth in this statement, nothing comes free as Lyster (2011) reminds us. A large degree of attention needs to be placed on form in the L2 if a degree of grammatical accuracy is to be acquired. The language mix in Irish immersion schools differs from other immersion contexts in so far as all subjects, except English language arts, are taught through the medium of Irish. After an initial total immersion phase, this model continues throughout all-Irish schooling to the final grades of post-primary education, representing approximately 85% of instructional time. This contrasts with the majority of one-way immersion programmes which gradually increase instruction through the L1 moving to a 50:50 model in senior grades of primary school. The vast majority of all-Irish schools are immersion centres as opposed to immersion tracks, streams or units. This enables all-Irish schools to operate entirely through the medium of Irish with pupils expected to speak Irish at all times including break-time in the playground. This environment provides additional opportunities for output in the target language which might aid acquisition. The fact that the vast majority of all-Irish schools are stand-alone immersion centres enables the pupils to have communicative opportunities outside of the classroom but within the school. It is interesting to explore the extent to which these opportunities are availed of by the pupils. As all subjects, other than English language arts, are taught through the medium of Irish, the pupils require a good command of Irish in order to access all curriculum subjects. Leaving aside the desire to increase the use of Irish in society, I believe that this factor of pupils accessing the curriculum requires that we enable them to attain a high level of proficiency in Irish. This proficiency encompasses oral and written production that approximates target-like norms in terms of morphology and syntax. Much of the focus in the examination of immersion pupils’ Irish in this volume is on morphology and syntax. In the corpus analysis, I investigate the linguistic errors made by the pupils and refer to their linguistic accuracy. In doing so, it is not my intention to reduce the issue to one of merely identifying the deficits in pupils’ language. My concern is that their language proficiency may possibly be inadequate for the ultimate purposes of the endeavour which I believe are twofold: (i) to experience a high-quality education in its broadest sense and (ii) to have sufficient competency in Irish and a desire to speak it when opportunities arise outside of the school context.

This leads me to the secondary aim of this volume which is to examine the potential for all-Irish school pupils to become active users of Irish outside the school environment and to increase the use of Irish in society. Ireland has a long history of immersion education. The initial immersion model used a top-down approach and was driven by the state. It enjoyed some success initially, but later lost the confidence of teachers, parents and the general public. With the more recent parent-led immersion model, one might expect parents to exercise a good deal of agency in relation to their own and their children’s use of Irish in the home in particular. However, we do not know to what extent parents use the Irish that they themselves learned in school with their children.

Structure of this Volume

The studies in this volume adopt a broad-based approach and examine the variety of Irish spoken by the pupils, the extent to which the Irish spoken deviates from native speaker norms, the degree to which pupils are aware of and attempt to acquire a native-like variety and the extent to which issues of identity and motivation are involved.

The volume is set out in nine chapters. This introductory chapter gives a brief overview of the current state of the Irish language in order to place the studies in context and set out their aims. Further information on the geographical and political context of the place of Irish in the education system is presented in Chapter 2. The role of the Irish language in education since the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 is described and contrasted with the position of Irish in the education system in Northern Ireland. The fortunes of Irish as a vernacular from the end of the 18th century are then briefly traced before giving an account of early state polices in relation to the language. The outcome of these policies is then critiqued. This is followed by a description of a new grass-root’s movement during the 1970s that saw a growing interest in all-Irish schools that has continued unabated to this day.

The field of SLA research is wide-ranging and diverse. It covers areas such as language learning in both naturalistic and instructional contexts. It is beyond the scope of this volume to review all of this literature. Instead, a number of theoretical perspectives on L2 learning with particular relevance for language learning in immersion programmes, and the unique situation in Ireland, are presented in Chapter 3. The theories that underlie SLA research are influenced by a variety of perspectives and approaches. Among these are universal grammar, sociocultural, sociolinguistic, cognitive and interactionist approaches to L2 learning. Immersion education is placed within the larger field of L2 learning and sociocultural learning. I discuss the role of interlanguage corpora in informing pedagogy in instructional settings and explore research and pedagogy in immersion education.

Chapter 4 gives an account of the research methodology I used to create a corpus of pupil speech. This corpus was analysed to provide a comprehensive description of the features of the primary pupils’ spoken Irish. Speech samples recorded during a collaborative task in 13 all-Irish schools make up this first corpus of its type for Irish in the primary school. These all-Irish schools were located across the island of Ireland in the RoI and NI. As there is no standard oral corpus of Irish available for adults or for children, I deemed it necessary to compile a second corpus of ‘native speaker’ (Gaeltacht) pupils for comparative purposes and so three Gaeltacht schools were visited to record samples of the pupils’ speech. It might be more accurate to describe these pupils as bilingual rather than native speakers. Ó Curnáin (2007) documented the decline in traditional forms of Irish and argued that a pure form of Irish no longer exists even in the strongest heartland areas. The speech of native speakers is characterised by code-mixing and there is evidence of the influence of English syntax. Nonetheless, this group was chosen for comparative purposes as all-Irish pupils are expected to reach a level of proficiency in Irish as close as possible to their bilingual counterparts in the Gaeltacht (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, 2015). Bilingual Gaeltacht pupils have greater exposure to Irish both as a community and as a home language and are considered the closest native speaker comparison available. Pupils’ speech in both school types was recorded while they were engaged in a collaborative task. In total, speech samples were gathered from 112 pupils, 89 in all-Irish schools and 23 in Gaeltacht schools.

In Chapter 5, I describe and analyse th...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Immersion Education in Ireland: Origins and Current Context
• 3 Language Learning in Immersion Education in Ireland and Internationally
• 4 Design of Studies
• 5 An Analysis of a Corpus of the Spoken Irish of All-Irish Pupils
• 6 Pupils’ Reflections on Their Communicative Performance in Irish
• 7 Use of Irish Outside the Classroom
• 8 Principal and Class Teacher Interviews to Explore Pupils’ Proficiency in Spoken Irish or French
• 9 Discussion
• References
• Appendix A: Pupil Questionnaire – Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB)
• Appendix B: Interview Schedule for Irish/French Immersion Teachers
• Index