The participation of multilingual children in minority language immersion programmes is under-researched internationally. The Republic of Ireland (RoI) has become a linguistically and culturally diverse society. In the RoI, parents have the opportunity to educate their child in English-medium or Irish-medium (IM) schools. However, the cohort of…

Assessing vocabulary knowledge is an important part of establishing language proficiency in bilingual children. The crosslinguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) provide a framework for testing vocabulary development in three-to-six year-olds using a standard procedure and comparable items for multiple languages. This study describes the development of the…

Sparse attention in the educational leadership literature is given to those leading immersion schools, despite the established connection between educational leadership and context, including cultural context. By eliciting principals' accounts of practices in leading Irish language-medium immersion education in secondary schools, this study begins…

There has been a long history of early Irish language learning in Ireland as a result of Government policy to promote greater use of Irish. All children learn Irish in school from age 4-18 years. The majority learn Irish as a subject, typically for 30-40 minutes per day, and the levels of competence achieved are mostly disappointing. Approximately…

This paper examines and discusses the profiles of applicants and entrants to the DGO (Dioplóma Gairmiúil san Oideachas) initial teacher education programme between 2000 and 2011. The DGO is the only initial teacher education programme in Ireland that is specifically designated to prepare student teachers for the second-level Irish-medium (SLIM)…

A central tenet of two-way immersion has been that the minority language children benefit from mother-tongue support in addition to instruction and interaction in the majority language (usually English) with their peers in high prestige programmes, while the English speakers gain valuable opportunities for peer interaction in their L2 with native…