Irish orthography: what do teachers and learners need to know about it, and why?

Irish has significant State support, but lacks a research base to support the teaching of Irish reading. Current approaches to teaching Irish reading are presented, and outcomes summarised. Issues of consistency and complexity in Irish orthography are discussed in light of an analysis of a corpus of early reader texts, and the formulation of rules for discriminating between words which are regular by letter-sound and grapheme-sound rules is outlined. While the most frequent words show a high level of regularity, underlying rules are very complex. The need to target decoding skills early is discussed. Recommendations regarding the teaching of aspects of Irish orthography are presented.

[1]  Máirtín Ó Murchú.  11. Successes and Failures in the Modernization of Irish Spelling , 1977 .

[2]  R. Fowkes,et al.  Teach Yourself Irish , 1979 .

[3]  U. Goswami,et al.  Children's orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish , 1998, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[4]  J. Masterson,et al.  Spongelike acquisition of sight vocabulary in beginning readers , 2000 .

[5]  P. Nation,et al.  Unknown vocabulary density and reading comprehension , 2020 .

[6]  T. Shanahan,et al.  Phonemic Awareness Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence From the National Reading Panel's Meta-Analysis , 2001 .

[7]  P. H. Seymour,et al.  Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies. , 2003, British journal of psychology.

[8]  J. Cummins.  Reading and the Bilingual Student: Fact and Friction , 2003 .

[9]  Gilbert C. Garcia,et al.  English Learners: Reaching the Highest Level of English Literacy. , 2003 .

[10]  Elizabeth B. Bernhardt.  Challenges to Reading Research from a Multilingual World. , 2003 .

[11]  Morag Stuart,et al.  Children's early reading vocabulary: description and word frequency lists. , 2003, The British journal of educational psychology.

[12]  D. Gardner.  Vocabulary input through extensive reading: A comparison of words found in children's narrative and expository reading materials , 2004 .

[13]  William Grabe,et al.  3. RESEARCH ON TEACHING READING , 2004, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

[14]  Nick C. Ellis,et al.  The Effects of Orthographic Depth on Learning to Read Alphabetic, Syllabic, and Logographic Scripts. , 2004 .

[15]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory. , 2005, Psychological bulletin.

[16]  T. Hickey.  Chapter 16: Second Language Writing Systems: Minority Languages and Reluctant Readers , 2005 .

[17]  K. Koda.  Insights into Second Language Reading: References , 2005 .

[18]  David J. Chard,et al.  Fluency: Bridge Between Decoding and Reading Comprehension , 2005 .

[19]  Paul Meara,et al.  Lexical Frequency Profiles: A Monte Carlo Analysis , 2005 .

[20]  I. Nation.  How Large a Vocabulary Is Needed for Reading and Listening? , 2006 .

[21]  James S. Harris.  Bilingual Education and Bilingualism in Ireland North and South , 2007 .

[22]  Gina L. Harrison,et al.  Relationship between L1 and L2 word‐level reading and phonological processing in adults learning English as a second language , 2007 .

[23]  T. Hickey.  Fluency in Reading Irish as L1 or L2: Promoting High-frequency Word Recognition in Emergent Readers , 2007 .

[24]  Early Reading Strategies in Irish and English: Evidence from Error Types , 2009 .

[25]  U. Goswami.  A psycholinguistic grain size view of reading acquisition across languages , 2010 .

[26]  L. Vowels.  The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes , 2010 .