Conference Contribution Details
Mandatory Fields
Ó Duibhir, P.
ISB11
Translanguaging in a one-way minority language immersion context
University of Limerick
Oral Presentation
2017
()
Optional Fields
Immersion education aims to increase the linguistic repertoire of students by adding competence in another language. Notwithstanding greater linguistic diversity in Irish immersion classrooms, students are majority speakers of English in the main. Typically, when students enter an Irish language immersion programme they experience an early total immersion approach. While the teacher communicates in Irish, the students respond in English. Over time, the students are encouraged to use the Irish they are acquiring drawing initially on formulaic expressions and code-mixing. As they gain greater mastery of Irish, the students are pushed to produce output in the target language. This might be interpreted by some as a denial of the linguistic repertoire of the students and the knowledge that they have encoded in English, their L1. It will be argued in this contribution that in order to facilitate L2 acquisition students need to continually extend their competence in the L2 and that this process is facilitated by pushed output. In the context of a one-way minority language immersion programme, the theories supporting the transfer of skills from one language to another may be more applicable than those of translanguaging. This paper will draw on the Primary Language Curriculum (National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, 2015) to demonstrate how languages might be taught in an integrated way that facilitates this skills transfer.