Tracking Biliteracy Skills in Students Attending Gaelic Medium Education: Effects of Learning Experience on Overall Reading Skills

Abstract

This study describes the validation of a reading assessment developed for speakers of Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language spoken in Scotland. The test is designed to investigate the areas of reading for understanding, reading errors and reading speed. This study will present the data on a group of Gaelic/English speakers on both the Gaelic and the English version of the test and of a group of English speakers on the English version of the reading test, aiming at comparing reading abilities in children attending a Gaelic medium education (GME) and children in English medium education (EME) living in the same urban area. The paper reports two studies. The first study presents data on 77 children bilingual in Gaelic/English recruited across four levels of primary school on reading in Gaelic. The second study looks at the performance on a version of the test adapted for English, comparing the performance of two groups of children (bilinguals Gaelic/English and monolinguals English) on several linguistic skills, including sentence comprehension and reading. About 40 monolingual English subjects in EME, living in the same urban area, were administered the English version. The reading abilities of the children attending EME and GME schools were comparable, supporting the idea of no disadvantage on reading from attending a school with the medium of a minority language. If differences were found, these were in favour of the bilingual Gaelic/English children, who attained better results in all linguistic tasks in English in the older groups.

Influence of an Immersive Virtual Environment on Learning Effect and Learning Experience

“…This study provides teachers and other researchers with additional information to improve the attitudes of students toward science because scientific attitudes are also related to the performance of students. Dickson et al [12] suggested tracking the bilingual skills of students participating in Gaelic medium education and analyzing the effects of learning experience on overall reading skills by providing data of Gaelic/English native speakers in the Gaelic and English versions of the test, and a set of data of English native speakers in the English version of the reading test to compare the reading ability of children in Gaelic secondary school and English secondary school living in the same urban area. The study reported two studies, the first one presented Gaelic reading data from 77 bilingual Gaelic/English children recruited from four different primary school levels, and the other one investigated the performance of a version of the test application to English.…”

Online assessment of narrative macrostructure in adult Irish-English multilinguals

“…A similar type of difficulty was observed in a study that examined another minority language, Gaelic, with respect to inference in reading comprehension. Dickson et al (2021) found that primary school children in Gaelic-medium education who had English as their dominant language struggled to answer questions requiring them to infer information from a paragraph they read. This difficulty, however, was not observed for both languages of the English-Gaelic bilinguals, which is different from the current study.…”

Chapter 3 Grammatical competence in adult heritage speakers of Italian and adult immigrants: A comparative study

“…One defining factor in childhood is age of first exposure: in grammar, early exposure tends to result in monolingual-like competence at least in some properties of language (Håkansson 1995;Montrul 2010;Montrul et al 2008;Polinsky 2008). Moreover, heritage speakers who had schooling in the heritage language are generally more aligned to the monolingual standard (Kupisch and Rothman 2018; Dickson et al 2021). Despite showing differences with the 'gold standard', heritage grammars seem to share qualitative similarities in their grammar with monolingual speakers more so than with another natural comparator, namely (adult) L2 learners.…”