Publications

Publication details [#62989]

Ní Dhiorbháin, Aisling and Pádraig Ó Duibhir. 2017. An explicit-inductive approach to grammar in Irish-medium immersion schools. Language Awareness 26 (1) : 3–24.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Routledge

Annotation

This paper centers on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which explored Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11–12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students’ improvement in linguistic accuracy in reply to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A range of typographically enhanced PowerPoint slides were designed to explicitly draw students’ attention to the genitive case in Irish over a four-week period. Students engaged in collaborative meta-talk with teacher and peers to construct rule-based knowledge and they recorded their findings in a reflective language journal. Qualitative data were gathered with a sub-sample of 56 students selected from 4 of the 12 schools that participated in the larger study. Student feedback points out the potential effectiveness of an explicit-inductive approach to improve student language awareness and grammatical accuracy in immersion education.