Despite the growth and popularity of Irish-medium Education (IME) in Northern Ireland, the sector has not received the same levels of state support and funding as has heritage language education in the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Educating children in an immersive language setting, particularly in a minority or endangered language,…

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…

The specific role of language in the teaching and learning of mathematics in bilingual contexts has been well documented. Previous research has tended to focus on the negative impact of language on learning, but there is a move towards a non-deficit view of bilingualism and utilising language-as-resource in the mathematics classroom. This paper…

Our aim here is to investigate reading in a foreign language from a multilingual perspective. Much research has focused on first- and second-language reading, especially the important role played by strategy deployment in helping readers to make meaning from texts in different languages. Less emphasis has been placed, however, on how bilinguals…

This paper presents a research framework for investigating the role of language use in mathematics learning. The paper draws on the wider M[superscript 2]EID study, which explores whether differences in languages (English and Irish) and their use by bilingual mathematical students have a differential impact on their mathematics meta-level…

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…

Schools in Ireland vary in how they introduce reading in the two official languages, Irish and English. There is particular variability within immersion (Irish medium) schools. Some introduce Irish reading first (IRF) and others English reading first (ERF). This study compared the development of Irish and English skills in children attending…

The focal point of the article is Irish language teaching in the Republic of Ireland. Firstly, we deal with the most significant documents where the status of the Irish language is being defined. In this respect, for the purposes of analysis, we have chosen the document titled "20 Year Strategy for the Irish language" which plays a…

The formulation of a languages-in-education policy (LEP) in Ireland illustrates some challenges at the macro- and micro-levels. A clamour for policy has reverberated through language education institutions in Ireland within the last decade. This paper explores and discusses: (1) the trajectory of an LEP in Ireland from initial formulation to…

In Ireland, there are areas where the Irish language is spoken exclusively, these areas are called Gaeltacht. Students living in those areas speak Irish both at home and at school. But outside those areas, schools teach in the English language. This is changing due to Gaelscoileanna. Now students who are speaking English at home and in the…

Diversity--social, cultural, linguistic and ethnic--poses a challenge to all educational systems. Some authorities, schools and teachers look upon it as a problem, an obstacle to the achievement of national educational goals, while for others it offers new opportunities. Successive PISA reports have laid bare the relative lack of success in…

During an investigation into the L2 proficiency and L3 acquisition skills of 10- to 12-year-olds in Irish primary schools, questions of metalinguistic awareness and cross-linguistic influence were raised. Do children who are more balanced bilinguals develop a higher sense of metalinguistic awareness than less balanced bilinguals? What evidence of…

The popular and official description of the Gaeltacht as Irish-speaking rather than bilingual areas reflects the historically dominant discourse on language ideology in Ireland. While there is little evidence that the Gaeltacht people want to learn English at the expense of their Irish, as may have been the case throughout Ireland in the past,…

The present paper explores the extent of Irish language use in networked communications, and attitudes towards the language by 125 schoolchildren from three backgrounds in Ireland: (1) an Irish-speaking area (Gaeltacht) and Irish medium of instruction, (2) an English-speaking area and Irish medium of instruction, and (3) an English-speaking area…

The present paper questions the validity of Macnamara's (1966) finding that teaching arithmetic through a bilingual's weaker language leads to retardation in problem arithmetic. By comparing the performance of immersion pupils on an Irish (as a second language) version of the problem arithmetic test with the performance of non-immersion pupils on…