Children’s Language Networks in Minority Language Immersion: What Goes In May Not Come Out

A central tenet of two-way immersion has been that the minority language children benefit from mother-tongue support in addition to instruction and interaction in the majority language (usually English) with their peers in high prestige programmes, while the English speakers gain valuable opportunities for peer interaction in their L2 with native speakers. Such mixing of L1 and L2 learners of the target language also occurs in minority language immersion programmes. This paper presents a qualitative study of L1 minority language children’s output in such mixed groups by examining their language networks and use of the target language, Irish, in Irish-medium preschools or naíonraí where they are interacting with L2 learners of Irish. Such networks are particularly interesting in the informal setting of preschool, where children have more freedom to move around and choose their interlocutor than in formal classrooms. This exploration of the children’s output and their language choices raises pertinent questions about the needs of minority language children for direct L1 enrichment. This leads to an examination of aspects of the teachers’ input to these minority language children in light of their linguistic needs and the evidence of contact phenomena in their output.