Introduction

From the analysis of all-Irish pupils' speech, we have established that errors occurred in 3 out of every 10 utterances among pupils during a collaborative playground design task. In choosing to study the linguistic accuracy of pupils' Irish, I felt it was important that the pupils would have a voice in the research. This was motivated by a desire to examine the issue from a sociolinguistic perspective (Tarone & Swain, 1995) and to balance the more cognitive, input interactionist-type analysis in the previous chapter. I knew from my own practice as an immersion teacher that pupils sometimes correct their grammatical mistakes when prompted by me, the teacher. In this research, I wanted to gain insights into the degree to which the pupils recognised their own errors, their ability to correct these errors and, finally, why they used inaccurate forms when they had access to more accurate language. After the corpus was gathered, transcribed and analysed, I returned to the schools to conduct stimulated recall sessions to provide the pupils with an opportunity to view a video recording of themselves engaged in the collaborative tasks and to view written excerpts of their recorded speech. This reflexive activity allowed the pupils to reflect on their use of Irish during the task and to comment on the quality of the language they used. The activity was also useful in investigating the underlying communicative competence of pupils. They were asked to identify any errors in their own speech that they recognised and to attempt to correct them. The stimulated recall sessions created opportunities for pupils' observations to act as a starting point for collaborative exploration about why their language contained certain lexical and syntactic features, such as the ones discussed in Chapter 5.

Stimulated Recall Activity

In each school, up to three groups of three pupils were video recorded as they engaged in a collaborative playground design task. The recordings of the pupils' speech during the activity were transcribed verbatim.