Typically, families from ethnic minority backgrounds and socioeconomic disadvantage are underrepresented in research. Using secondary data from a survey of the language practices of multilingual families during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we sought to ascertain whether the unexpectedly large proportion of Bradford-based respondents…

This volume marks the 2022 centenary of the first National Programme for Education in the Free State. Central to the outlook of the new educational programme was the position of the Irish language as a marker of Irish national identity and culture. Education was to be the means to revitalise the language and cultural nationalism eroded through…

This is a pilot study on the relationship between speaking Irish and belonging, with a focus on Irish-speakers of diverse ethnicities and/or nationalities in Ireland. The research includes twelve respondents with diverse backgrounds in terms of nationality and/or ethnicity. We examine whether the language gives them a sense of belonging to…

While research on Irish-medium immersion education (IME) has heralded benefits such as cognitive skills, academic achievement and language and literacy development, many studies have also identified challenges to its successful implementation. Immersion-specific research-validated tools can help school leaders navigate the school self-evaluation…

Education is key to the structural integration of immigrants and their children. While research indicates that educational inequalities by migration background are a serious issue, relatively little is known about when, how and why they develop. The current paper adds to the literature by investigating to what extent achievement gaps by migration…

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…

This study responds to calls for more research on motivations for learning languages other than English (LOTEs) in the new era dominated by global English. In particular, it focuses on the role of societal contextual factors surrounding the status of English and the status of the LOTE as an L2/L3, as factors which may offer a more nuanced…

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,…

This paper examines the construct of bilingual phonemic awareness in Irish-English bilinguals. Though traditionally viewed as a skill or ability which transfers across languages, recent accounts have considered whether phonemic awareness has a language-specific component. This study used a cross-sectional design to examine this question. A total…

This paper focuses on international student mobility and the funding of higher education. We theorize that relying on international students for funding is stronger for institutions in developed English-speaking countries because they more often adopt marketization practices. Compared to Northern and Southern European countries, we find that they…

Despite the growing importance of Chinese in many contexts, the ideological orientations towards the Chinese language and its speakers embedded in the wider socio-political context remain under-researched. This study intends to bridge this gap by interpreting media representations of 'Chinese' in Irish print media. A combination of corpus…

Second Language Pragmatics (L2 pragmatics) research focused on the study abroad (SA) context points out the benefits of this context for second language (L2) pragmatic development while also illustrating the non-linearity of this development, as it is shaped by different contextual factors and individual differences. Nevertheless, this research…

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…

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…