Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

Irish remains as a community language in only in a small number of areas, known as the
Gaeltacht, mainly on the western coast. In Census 2006, 70.8% (64,265) of the population of
these communities reported that they could speak Irish, but only 57% (36,846) of them
reported that they spoke Irish daily, pointing to a perilously low number of daily speakers
even in supposedly Irish speaking communities. A recent analysis of Irish use in Gaeltacht
areas (Ó Giollagáin et al., 2007) projects that Irish is likely to remain a home/community
language there for at most another twenty years, unless major policy changes are
implemented. Ó Riagáin (2001) attributed the increase in the rate of language shift in the
Gaeltacht to a decline in the number of marriages between fluent speakers, and a reduction
in the number of parents with high ability in Irish who have children with similarly high level
of Irish in recent decades. The best indicator of home-generated Irish ability is found in the
figures for 3-4 year olds in Gaeltacht areas, and in Census 2006, 51% of this age group were
returned as ‘able to speak Irish’ (although only 42% were reported to speak Irish on a daily
basis). Clearly there is a great deal of variability in language use in the home, which means
that children who begin to attend naíonraí or pre-schools in these areas may come as fluent
Irish speakers, as bilinguals with some proficency in both languages, or as English speakers
beginning to acquire Irish. As a result, there is a high level of language contact from a very
young age between these two languages of very unequal status: A survey of Gaeltacht
naíonraí (Hickey, 1999) found that children from Irish-only homes (L1 Irish speakers) were in
the majority in only 20% of naíonraí in these areas, while children from English-only homes
(L2 learners of Irish) were in the majority in 40% of these groups, the remainder having a
majority of children from homes where both Irish and English are spoken.
Thus, while the majority of children attending immersion preschooling in Ireland are being
exposed to Irish as their L2 as part of a revitalisation effort, as in the classic model of
immersion education, immersion preschools in Ireland also play a part in minority language
maintenance in catering for the minority of children who acquire Irish in their home, either
as their only language, or bilingually. In this case, parents are opting for a preschool service
that uses these minority language children's home language as the medium of instruction, in
order to support and extend it before they are exposed to the majority/community
language, as a basis for later bilingualism. In Ireland, as in other countries such as Wales, the
Basque Country and New Zealand, such monolingual minority language preschools are part
of language revitalisation movements aiming to develop bilingualism through consolidating
the non-dominant language in young native-speakers before it is overwhelmed by the
majority language, as well as helping L2 learners to acquire it. The need to support
threatened home languages arises because of erosion of domains of use, limited numbers of
speakers outside the home, and variations in parental proficiency and input. These pressures
can affect children’s cognitive and academic development, and preschool education through
the minority language offers important support to help such children, not only to develop
their mother-tongue, but also their cognitive skills through that language, and to form peer
group networks through the minority language, which help to prevent marginalisation and
low self-esteem. However, given the numbers and the geographical distribution, it is
generally not possible to provide separate groups for children who are acquiring Irish as their
L2 from those whose L1 is Irish, as discussed in Hickey (2005, 2007). Such grouping of L1 and
L2 minority language speakers together poses particular challenges for teachers and teacher
training, and some of the issues concerned with best practice in this regard will be
considered here.
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