Introduction

In the first two parts of this book we were concerned with foreign language teaching and learning at school. This is an area in which there is still a widely recognized shortfall in learning achievement, despite repeated initiatives at European and national levels (see, for example, European Commission, 2012). The solution we propose is the deliberate exploitation of learner agency and the progressive development of language learner autonomy. In this chapter we argue that in an age of large-scale migration, autonomous learning is also the surest way of providing for the linguistic, social and educational inclusion of immigrants, clearly one of the most urgent tasks facing our societies. After all, if adult immigrants are to manage their own lives, to become ‘social agents’ (Council of Europe, 2001: 9) in the fullest sense of that term, they need to achieve at least functional proficiency in the language of their host community; while immigrant children and adolescents cannot fulfil their educational potential unless they acquire near-native fluency in the language of schooling.

The chapter presents two case studies from Ireland, traditionally a country of emigration rather than immigration. In recent years, unprecedented levels of immigration have transformed the linguistic fabric of Irish society and the linguistic profile of the school-going population. In the 1990s, relatively small numbers of refugees were admitted to the country under the terms of the Irish government’s agreements with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR); the expansion of the economy at the end of the decade attracted asylum seekers in ever-increasing numbers; workers were recruited, chiefly from eastern Europe, to fill gaps in the Irish workforce; and when 10 new countries joined the European Union in 2004, what had started as a trickle became a flood. In 2006 and 2007 annual net migration (the total number of immigrants less the total number of emigrants) was around 70,000. Although this figure decreased significantly with the collapse of the Irish economy in 2008, the 2011 census showed that 17% of the population had been born outside Ireland.