An explicit-inductive approach to grammar in Irish-medium immersion schools

What is it about?

This article focuses on qualitative self-report data from a mixed-methods study which investigated Grade 5 and 6 (n = 274), 11–12-year-old, Irish-medium (IM) immersion students’ improvement in linguistic accuracy in response to an explicit-inductive approach to form-focused instruction (FFI). A series 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 indicates the potential effectiveness of an explicit-inductive approach to improve student language awareness and grammatical accuracy in immersion education.

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