This paper draws on three years of fieldwork within informal supported play-groups in inner Sydney. In Australia, some 40% of children reach school age without attending formal preschools. Aboriginal and immigrant groups are greatly overrepresented in this statistic. For these children, informal playgroups, funded from a range of government and…

The teaching and learning of Irish in primary school is both an important educational issue and central to the national language revitalization effort. The findings of Irish-language programme evaluations, therefore, are invariably scrutinized very closely by different sectors. This paper examines how the later stages of a major evaluation took…

Describes the attributes of effective programs and teachers serving language-minority students. Summarizes findings from large-scale studies and describes a case study of two bilingual early childhood teachers. Their instructional perspectives and practices are discussed in terms of the role of language and culture in their classrooms, their…