In compiling this volume, I set out to establish the degree to which all-Irish primary schools were capable of producing competent Irish speakers. Based on the evidence presented in the previous chapters, we can conclude that pupils attain very good communicative competence in Irish but lack grammatical accuracy. This finding is very much in keeping with one-way immersion programmes elsewhere for minority languages where there is little exposure to the immersion language outside the school context.

A secondary question in this research was the extent to which competence in Irish might be converted to active bilingualism in society. The evidence base that I have presented for this latter question is less extensive and is based on the following factors:

• • the home language practices of parents with their children, particularly those parents who attended an all-Irish school;

• • the home language practices of pupils with their parents;

• • the language behaviour of pupils within the school but outside the classroom.

Having analysed this evidence, we can tentatively conclude that the conversion rate of this potential is poor but that further longitudinal research is needed to be more definitive.

In reaching these conclusions, it is worth recapping the sources upon which they are based. The principal aim of this book was to bring together the results of a number of studies that investigated and evaluated the proficiency in Irish of pupils in all-Irish primary schools. The primary focus for assessing the pupils' competence was the corpus of speech samples recorded during a collaborative task in 13 all-Irish and 3 Gaeltacht schools for comparative purposes. The ability of the pupils to complete the task in Irish with fluency and communicative ease was very evident in the recordings. The analysis of their errors and an error rate of 30.2% in their utterances confirm that they do not reach native-like levels in spoken production after seven-plus years of immersion education.