DOCSLIB.ORG

The Spoken Irish of Pupils in Irish-Medium Schools in Northern Ireland

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Spoken Irish of Pupils in Irish-Medium Schools in Northern Ireland Gaeilge labhartha na bpáistí i scoileanna lán-Ghaeilge i dTuaisceart na hÉireann The spoken Irish of pupils in Irish-medium schools in Northern Ireland Pádraig Ó Duibhir, Coláiste Phádraig, Ollscoil Bhaile Átha Cliath [email protected] Jill Garland, Coláiste Ollscoile Naomh Muire, Béal Feirste [email protected] December 2010 Contents CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .............................................................................. 1 1.1 Background ............................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................... 4 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY ................................. 6 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 6 3.2 Methodology .............................................................................................................. 7 3.2.1 Objectives ............................................................................................................... 7 3.2.2 Ethnomethodology: collaborative task and stimulated recall ................................. 7 3.2.3 Quantitative approach: analysis of pupil speech ..................................................... 9 3.2.4 Phenomenology ...................................................................................................... 9 3.3 Participants ................................................................................................................ 9 3.3.1 Invitation to participate in the study ..................................................................... 11 3.4 The research instruments ....................................................................................... 11 3.4.1 Playground-design task ......................................................................................... 12 3.4.2 Stimulated recall ................................................................................................... 13 3.4.3 Principal and class teacher interviews .................................................................. 14 CHAPTER 4: DESCRIPTION OF CORPUS OF PUPILS’ SPEECH .....................16 4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 16 4.2 Description of corpus .............................................................................................. 16 4.2.1 Analytic systems ................................................................................................... 16 4.2.2 Preliminary type/token analysis ............................................................................ 17 4.3 50 most common words: Variations by school type ............................................. 19 4.4 Analysis of corpus for the presence of errors ....................................................... 24 4.5 Code-mixing and code-switching ........................................................................... 26 4.5.1 Intrasentential use: The 25 most common English words .................................... 27 4.5.2 The general use of English words ......................................................................... 29 4.5.3 Pupil-pupil exchanges: Language related episodes .............................................. 30 i 4.6 Discussion of results ................................................................................................ 31 CHAPTER 5: THE SYNTACTIC AND LEXICAL FEATURES OF IRISH-MEDIUM AND ALL-IRISH SCHOOL PUPIL’S IRISH ...........................................................34 5.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 34 5.2 Syntactic and morphological features of Irish ..................................................... 34 5.2.1 Initial mutations in Irish ........................................................................................ 35 5.2.2 Word order principles in main clauses ................................................................. 35 5.2.3 Word order principles in verbal noun clauses ...................................................... 36 5.2.4 The copula Is and substantive verb Bí .................................................................. 37 5.2.5 Irregular verbs ....................................................................................................... 38 5.3 The syntactic and lexical features of all-Irish pupils’ Irish ................................ 39 5.3.1 Layout of glosses .................................................................................................. 40 5.3.2 Syntactic features of pupils’ Irish ......................................................................... 40 5.3.3 Use of the copula ‘Is’ ............................................................................................ 41 5.3.4 The substantive verb Bí ........................................................................................ 50 5.3.5 Morphology of the verbs caith, cuir, déan and faigh ............................................ 56 5.3.6 Use of numbers ..................................................................................................... 67 5.3.7 Use of interrogative pronouns Cad, Cad é, and Céard .......................................... 68 5.3.10 Pupils’ use of the pronoun é ‘it’ ........................................................................ 70 5.3.11 Mapping English syntax onto Irish ................................................................... 72 5.4 Discussion ................................................................................................................ 75 5.4.1 Morphology of verbs ............................................................................................ 75 5.4.2 Use of numbers ..................................................................................................... 76 5.4.3 Influence of English .............................................................................................. 77 5.4.4 Analytic teaching methodology ............................................................................ 77 CHAPTER 6: PUPILS’ REFLECTIONS ON THEIR COMMUNICATIVE PERFORMANCE IN IRISH ....................................................................................79 6.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 79 6.2 Stimulated recall activity ........................................................................................ 79 6.3 Pupils’ perceptions of the quality of their Irish and code-mixing ...................... 82 6.4 Correction of mistakes following reflection on output ........................................ 84 6.4.1 Correction of specific mistakes ............................................................................. 84 6.5 Pupils’ insights into the incorrect features of their Irish output ........................ 87 6.5.1 Monitoring of output ............................................................................................. 87 6.5.2 Translation from English ...................................................................................... 88 ii 6.6 Discussion ................................................................................................................ 89 CHAPTER 7: PRINCIPAL AND CLASS TEACHER INTERVIEWS REGARDING THEIR PUPILS’ PROFICIENCY IN SPOKEN IRISH. ............................................92 7.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 92 7.2 Method ..................................................................................................................... 93 7.2.1 Study sample ......................................................................................................... 93 7.2.2 Interviews of teachers ........................................................................................... 93 7.2.3 Data analysis ......................................................................................................... 94 7.3 Results ...................................................................................................................... 94 7.3.1 Teacher satisfaction with students’ proficiency in Irish ....................................... 95 7.3.2 Features of pupils’ spoken Irish ............................................................................ 96 7.3.3 Pupil willingness to speak Irish .......................................................................... 103 7.3.4 School planning and staff meetings in relation to pupils’ proficiency in Irish ... 105 7.3.5 Teachers’ professional development needs ........................................................ 106 7.4 Discussion .............................................................................................................. 107 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS .............................110 8.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 110 8.2 Conclusions .................................................................................................................. 111 8.2.1 Irish-medium education in Northern Ireland .....................................................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Pronouns and Prosody in Irish&Sast;
    PRONOUNS AND PROSODY IN IRISH* RYAN BENNETT Yale University EMILY ELFNER University of British Columbia JAMES MCCLOSKEY University of California, Santa Cruz 1. BACKGROUND One of the stranger properties of human language is the way in which it creates a bridge between two worlds which ought not be linked, and which seem not to be linked in any other species—a bridge linking the world of concepts, ideas and propositions with the world of muscular gestures whose outputs are perceivable. Because this link is made in us we can do what no other creature can do: we can externalize our internal and subjective mental states in ways that expose them to scrutiny by others and by ourselves. The existence of this bridge depends in turn on a system or systems which can take the complex structures used in cognition (hierarchical and recursive) and translate them step by step into the kinds of representations that our motor system knows how to deal with. In the largest sense, our goal in the research reported on here is to help better understand those systems and in particular the processes of serialization and flattening that make it possible to span the divide between the two worlds. In doing this, we study something which is of central importance to the question of what language is and how it might have emerged in our species. Establishing sequential order is, obviously, a key part of the process of serialization. And given the overall perspective just suggested, it is *Four of the examples cited in this paper (examples (35), (38a), (38b), and (38c)) have sound-files associated with them.
    [Show full text]
  • Understanding Irish Spelling
    Understanding Irish Spelling A Handbook for Teachers and Learners Nancy Stenson and Tina Hickey Understanding Irish Spelling A Handbook for Teachers and Learners Nancy Stenson and Tina Hickey i © Stenson and Hickey 2018 ii Acknowledgements The preparation of this publication was supported by a grant from An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaíochta, and we wish to express our sincere thanks to COGG, and to Muireann Ní Mhóráin and Pól Ó Cainín in particular. We acknowledge most gratefully the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship scheme for enabling this collaboration through its funding of an Incoming International Fellowship to the first author, and to UCD School of Psychology for hosting her as an incoming fellow and later an as Adjunct Professor. We also thank the Fulbright Foundation for the Fellowship they awarded to Prof. Stenson prior to the Marie Curie fellowship. Most of all, we thank the educators at first, second and third level who shared their experience and expertise with us in the research from which we draw in this publication. We benefitted significantly from input from many sources, not all of whom can be named here. Firstly, we wish to thank most sincerely all of the participants in our qualitative study interviews, who generously shared their time and expertise with us, and those in the schools that welcomed us to their classrooms and facilitated observation and interviews. We also wish to thank the participants at many conferences, seminars and presentations, particularly those in Bangor, Berlin, Brighton, Hamilton and Ottawa, as well as those in several educational institutions in Ireland who offered comments and suggestions.
    [Show full text]
  • Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 (A1) Syllabus Bonnleibhéal 1 (A1)
    Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 (A1) Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 (A1) Syllabus Bonnleibhéal 1 (A1) © Lárionad na Gaeilge, Ollscoil Mhá Nuad 3 Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 (A1) Contents Page 1. Foreword .......................................................................................................... 3 2. The content of Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1........................................................ 3 3. Grammar .......................................................................................................... 5 4. Learners and the language learning process ................................................... 5 4.1 Learning and communication strategies ................................................... 5 4.2 Language awareness ................................................................................. 8 5. Sociocultural knowledge ................................................................................ 10 6. Skills ................................................................................................................ 10 7. Scrúdú Bhonnleibhéal 1 .................................................................................. 10 Topic 1: Meeting people .................................................................................... 11 Topic 2: Background and place of residence ..................................................... 14 Topic 3: The family ............................................................................................. 18 Topic 4: The house and accommodation
    [Show full text]
  • Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish Emily Elfner University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected]
    University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 2-2012 Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish Emily Elfner University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Phonetics and Phonology Commons, and the Syntax Commons Recommended Citation Elfner, Emily, "Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 505. https://doi.org/10.7275/3545-6n54 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/505 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS IN IRISH A Dissertation Presented by EMILY JANE ELFNER Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2012 Department of Linguistics © Copyright by Emily Jane Elfner 2012 All Rights Reserved SYNTAX-PROSODY INTERACTIONS IN IRISH A Dissertation Presented by EMILY JANE ELFNER Approved as to style and content by: _________________________________________ Elisabeth O. Selkirk, Chair _________________________________________ John Kingston, Member _________________________________________ John J. McCarthy, Member _________________________________________ James McCloskey, Member _________________________________________ Mark Feinstein, Member ________________________________________ Margaret Speas, Department Head Linguistics ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been written without the input and support from many different people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Lisa Selkirk. Her input and support throughout the last few years has been invaluable, and I couldn’t have asked for more in an advisor.
    [Show full text]
  • (A1) Syllabus Bonnleibhéal 1
    Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 (A1) Teastas Eorpach na Gaeilge Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 (A1) Syllabus Bonnleibhéal 1 (A1) © Lárionad na Gaeilge, Ollscoil Mhá Nuad 3 Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 (A1) Contents Page 1. Foreword ..........................................................................................................3 2. The content of Siollabas Bhonnleibhéal 1 .......................................................3 3. Grammar ..........................................................................................................5 4. Learners and the language learning process ...................................................5 4.1 Learning and communication strategies ...................................................5 4.2 Language awareness .................................................................................8 5. Sociocultural knowledge ................................................................................10 6. Skills ................................................................................................................10 7. Scrúdú Bhonnleibhéal 1 ..................................................................................10 Topic 1: Meeting people ....................................................................................11 Topic 2: Background and place of residence .....................................................14 Topic 3: The family .............................................................................................18 Topic 4: The house and accommodation ...........................................................22
    [Show full text]
  • The Autonomous and the Passive Progressive in 20Th-Century Irish
    ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Studia Celtica Upsaliensia 5 Karin Hansson The Autonomous and the Passive Progressive in 20th-Century Irish Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Celtic Languages presented at Uppsala University in 2004 ABSTRACT Hansson, K. 2004. The Autonomous and the Passive Progressive in 20th-Century Irish. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Studia Celtica Upsaliensia 5. 176 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91-554- 5899-8. The present study deals with the use of two Irish verb constructions, the auto-nomous (e.g. cuireadh litreacha chun bealaigh, ‘letters were dispatched’) and the passive progressive (e.g. bhí m’athair á leigheas acu, ‘my father was being cured by them’), in a corpus of 20th- century texts. From this corpus, 2,956 instances of the autonomous and 467 instances of the passive progressive were extracted and included in the analysis. Dialectal variation concern- ing the use of these two constructions is also surveyed. The study explores and compares the use of the autonomous and the passive progressive. The main aim of the study is to investigate the two constructions with regard to their textual functions. The features studied relate to verb and clause type, as well as the measuring of topicality of patients, implicit agents, and—in the passive progressive only—overt agents. The autonomous tends to be used when the patient is topical, or central, in the text. The passive progressive, on the other hand, is mainly used with an overt agent that is considera- bly more topical than the patient. In agent-less passive progressives, patients and implicit agents are equally low in topicality.
    [Show full text]
  • Mac Grianna and Conrad: a Case Study in Translation
    Mac Grianna and Conrad: A Case Study in Translation Sinéad Coyle Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. to the Faculty of Arts, University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Derry October 2018 I confirm that the word count of this thesis is less than 100,000 words I Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………… IV ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………… V ABBREVIATIONS VI ACCESS TO CONTENTS ........................................................................................ VII INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... - 1 - METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................... - 6 - CHAPTER 1 ........................................................................................................... - 7 - REVIEW OF TRANSLATION STUDIES ................................................................. - 7 - INTRODUCTION: BACKGROUND TO TRANSLATION STUDIES ....................................... - 7 - TRANSLATION BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY .................................................... - 9 - LINGUISTIC THEORIES OF TRANSLATION................................................................. - 18 - POSTMODERN THEORY AND ITS INFLUENCE ON TRANSLATION STUDIES ................... - 25 - POST-COLONIAL TRANSLATION THEORY ................................................................ - 29 - PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION .................................................... - 32 - DERRIDA AND DECONSTRUCTION
    [Show full text]
  • R Sh Phrase Book
    H PH RS RASE BOOK, I L L U S T R A T I N G THE VARI OUS MEANI NGS AND USES VERBS AND PREPOSI TI ONS C O M B I N E D . THE REV E D M D HO GA N S . M . R . I . A . U N , J , ’ C LT C M N R A N D RO! L R S H C D M! S E I E! A I E , A I I A A E TODD P ROFESSO R OF T HE CE LTI C LAN G UAGES . D U B L I N : S U L L I V A N E R T H E R , 0 S A . T O M 8: LI M I T E D ( H CO . , ) , 2 6 A N D 2 7 M A R L B O R O U G H S T R E E T. I NTRODUCTI ON. I N E n li sh f g the direct object o a verb is in the accusative case, and all other cases attached to verbs are cons idered as indirect f L objects . But not un requently in atin and other languages the b b or indirect o ject (in the genitive, dative, a lative, preposi ti on al h case) , corresponds to the direct object in Englis , as ’ ‘ ’ lac u i t e p mihi, it pleased me parc populo, spare the people a ’ ‘ ’ I nuire la santé, to injure the health ; ich danke Ihnen, ’ ‘ ’ f or f a u f f .
    [Show full text]
  • Aspects of Verbal Noun Constructions in Medieval Irish and Welsh
    Aspects of Verbal Noun C onstructions in Medieval Irish and Welsh Aspects of VerbalWith RNounefere nConstructionsce to Similar in Medieval ConIrishstruc tandions Welshin Basque With Reference to Similar Constructions in Basque Patricia Ronan Patricia Ronan PhD Dissertation National University of Ireland, Maynooth Supervisor: Prof. K. R. McCone August 2006 2 Abstract This study provides a survey of the constructions of verbal nouns with prep- ositions that are used in a significant way, such as creating syntactic and semantic contexts not found with ordinary nouns. Particular emphasis is placed on constructions serving to denote tense, mood and aspect. Also some syntactic contexts involving verbal nouns as objects are examined. This ma- terial has been collected primarily from Old and Middle Irish texts, but some reference is made to Modern Irish where this seems helpful in order to illus- trate developments. The observations made are compared to findings on the use of verbal nouns in a closely related language, Middle Welsh, and an unrelated, non-Indo-European language, Basque. The discussion of the Me- dieval Irish material is followed by the evaluation of an illustrative corpus of Middle Welsh data and available descriptions of Welsh verbal nouns. Paral- lel constructions in these Insular Celtic languages are then brought together in order to assess which prepositional verbal noun constructions might have been a feature of Insular Celtic. Data from Basque is compared to the find- ings for Insular Celtic. The results seek to identify the language specific features of Old Irish verbal nouns and a common core of verbal noun usage in Insular Celtic as opposed to other usages adopted by a non-Indo-European sample language.
    [Show full text]
  • Nigel Duffield, Particles and Projections in Irish Syntax
    Chomsky, N. (). Some notes on economy of derivation and representation. In Freidin, R. (ed.) Principles and parameters in comparative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (). A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. In Hale, K. & Keyser, S. J. (eds.) The view from Building . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (). The Minimalist Program (Chapter ). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fiengo, R. & May, R. (). Anaphora and ellipsis. Ms., CUNY and UCI. Manzini, M. R. & Roussou, A. (). A Minimalist Theory of A-movement and control. Ms., University of Florence and University of Wales, Bangor. Pesetsky, D. (). Language particular processes and the Earliness Principle. Ms., MIT. Reinhart, T. (). Interface strategies. Ms., Utrecht. OTS. Author’s address: Anna Roussou, Department of Linguistics, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL DG, U.K. E-mail: a.roussou!bangor.ac.uk (Received July ) Nigel Duffield, Particles and projections in Irish syntax (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, . Pp. xiv­. Reviewed by A C, Harvard University When one works in a specialized field such as Celtic language syntax, it is a rare pleasure when a whole book devoted to the grammar of one’s language specialty appears in print. Although in recent years numerous papers have addressed issues in the generative syntax of Irish, in the past years only two other books have been devoted solely to the topic: McCloskey () and Stenson (). Nigel Duffield’s book Particles and projections in Irish syntax thus fills a very obvious void, being the first book in almost fifteen years to examine the syntax of Irish from a generative (or more precisely minimalist) perspective.
    [Show full text]
  • Irish Dependency Treebanking and Parsing Teresa Lynn
    Irish Dependency Treebanking and Parsing Teresa Lynn B.Sc. in Applied Computational Linguistics A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) under a Double Award Agreement at the School of Computing Department of Computing Dublin City University Macquarie University Supervised by Dr. Jennifer Foster Associate Prof. Mark Dras January 2016 I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of Ph.D. is entirely my own work, that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed: (Candidate) ID No.: 98300890 Date: Contents Acknowledgements xvii Abstract xx 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Irish Language Technology . .4 1.2 Dependency Treebanking . .6 1.3 Dependency Parsing . .8 1.4 Expanding Irish NLP to Social Media . 10 1.5 Research Questions . 11 1.6 Thesis Structure . 12 1.7 Publications . 13 2 Background 15 2.1 The Irish Language . 16 2.2 An Overview of Irish linguistics . 19 2.2.1 Irish Syntax . 20 2.2.2 Irish Morphology . 24 2.3 Dependency Treebanks . 29 2.3.1 An Overview of Dependency Syntax . 30 2.3.2 Projectivity . 32 2.3.3 Dependency Tree Data Formats . 33 2.4 Summary and Conclusion . 35 i 3 Irish Dependency Treebank 36 3.1 Building the Irish Dependency Treebank | the starting point .
    [Show full text]
  • Working on Irish
    Working on Irish The Background James McCloskey Since it is, according to the constitution, the ‘first official language' of the Republic of Ireland, Irish is the national language of a first-world capitalist democracy. English is recognized as the `second official language'. As critics of national language policies continually point out, though, these constitutional claims reflect wishful thinking or hypocrisy rather than reality. For almost all purposes, Ireland is an English-speaking country and for the vast majority of the population, Irish plays no role whatever in day to day routines. For all that, the language has real importance as a cultural and political symbol, and as a consequence it enjoys most of the trappings and conveniences that one would expect of a national language—a TV channel, a radio network, a large published literature, newspapers, a large presence in the educational system, and numbers of civil servants who are charged with the tasks of coining official neologisms, managing spelling reforms, producing reference grammars and dictionaries, and so on. Many of these people perform their tasks with great discrimination and skill. At the same time, Irish is an endangered language spoken as a vernacular by an embattled and marginalized community whose cultural and economic survival is very much open to doubt. For one of the ways in which official language promotion policies have dramatically failed has been in the effort to maintain the language in those communities in which it has at least until recently been the vernacular—the Gaeltachta´ı. These are small rural communities scattered along the southern and western seaboard.
    [Show full text]