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Abstract
This paper describes some of the findings emerging from a small-scale pilot study investigating the potential of a tablet app, Our Story (Ar Stòiridh), to enhance language-learning opportunities for children in Gaelic-medium preschool playrooms. The intervention drew on design-based research, a methodology for investigating the relationships among educational theory, designed artefact and practice. A significant feature of this approach is the close collaboration between researchers and practitioners in identifying the problem to be addressed by the intervention and refining, through successive iterations, the solution. Detailed documentation of the process enables the researchers to keep track of practical barriers or facilitators, and often leads to design changes. In this case, it emerged that there were marked differences between the researchers' and the practitioners' beliefs about effective language learning in the early years, a finding which would have had a bearing on the development of the design beyond the pilot phase. It is argued that this finding has implications for theoretical understanding of how preschool practitioners set about supporting children as they learn a new language in immersion-style settings; and of how to design practical interventions, such as the use of digital technologies to support early language learning or professional development for preschool practitioners in such settings.
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Scottish Funding Council's Innovation Voucher Scheme, with a grant of £4820. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Stòrlann Naiseanta na Gàidhlig, the organisation charged with co-ordinating the production and distribution of Gaelic educational resources throughout Scotland for this work, and the staff and pupils of the two preschool settings who generously gave up their time for this work and contributed many valuable ideas.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The work of Hickey is an exception: see in particular Hickey (Citation2013), Hickey, Lewis, and Baker (Citation2014) and earlier work such as Hickey (Citation1997).
2. See MacKinnon, Citation2006, for a summary of findings from a series of language surveys conducted in the Western Isles in the 1970s and 1980s, confirming this perception at the time. Between the 1981 and 2001, according to the Census, the proportion of children in the Western Isles aged 3--15 who could speak Gaelic fell from 68% to 46%.
3. For more information about this app, see http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/educational-technology-and-practice/educational-practice/reading-and-child-development-the-our-story-app-introduction. We are extremely grateful to Professor David Messer, Natalia Kucirkova and their colleagues at the Open University for allowing us to use the app for our own research purposes and for their support during the Ar Stòiridh project.
4. For example, in Gaelic, rhyme involves matching vowel sounds, while consonants before and after the vowel are governed by rules of similarity but need not be identical. The classical position is set out in Knott (Citation1934). Lyon (Citation2010) discusses the implications of such differences between Gaelic and English for the development of literacy in GME classrooms.
5. There is no equivalent in Gaelic for the Anglophone concept of ‘native speaker’, reflecting the reality that even in homes where Gaelic is regularly spoken, children grow up with both Gaelic and English from a very early age. ‘Luchd fileanta’ (fluent speakers) have a certain ambivalence about defining their linguistic status in ways which might imply that one of the two languages is the more dominant. (See O'Rourke Citation2011; O'Rourke and Ramallo Citation2011; McLeod, O'Rourke, and Dunsmore, Citation2014, for a more detailed discussion of this issue.)