Innovation in Language Learning

Teachers in Irish-medium immersion (IMI) education are professionally charged with making academic content comprehensible to students learning through a minority or second language. It is necessary therefore for the IMI teacher to be a proficient user of the Irish language and display a broad range of advanced linguistic skills and competences e.g. lexicon, grammar, semantics, sociolinguistics. This paper reports on qualitative research conducted on a Masters of Education in Irish-medium Immersion Education Programme (An M. Oid. san Oideachas Lán-Ghaeilge). This blended learning postgraduate programme aims to develop an essential knowledge-base, deep understandings and key competencies so as to enable students to fulfil this complex and dynamic role as IMI educators. An attempt was made to deploy online strategies (asynchronous and synchronous content delivery) to support language learning and to generate online tasks (language learning blogs, wikis, discussion fora, online collaborative glossary) to enable language use and enrichment, interaction, professional dialogue, critical thinking and learning. An underlying aim of task design was to enhance language awareness and knowledge about language learning.This study tapped into the lived experiences of eight postgraduate students, all of whom were Irish-medium immersion teachers. Qualitative data were collected from a variety of sources e.g. online survey, student feedback, module questionnaires and focus groups to assess the impact of the blended approach and online task design on students’ perceptions of their language learning experiences. Findings suggest that the collaborative nature of online interaction in Irish was central to developing students’ linguistic resources in Irish. Through engaging with new language in this blended learning programme, students became more language aware and language informed and this language awareness positively impacted on communicative online language ability. Findings from this research study also enhances our understanding of how to craft a dual focus coherent online pedagogy which simultaneously unpacks and enriches both programme content and associated language.