The teaching and learning of Irish in primary school is both an important educational issue and central to the national language revitalization effort. The findings of Irish-language programme evaluations, therefore, are invariably scrutinized very closely by different sectors. This paper examines how the later stages of a major evaluation took…

The paper offers a retrospective evaluation of recent evaluative studies of bilingual programs in the Australian state of Victoria, in an attempt to determine how successfully the evaluation process met the dual criteria of external accountability and development. The programs in question were located in primary or secondary government schools and…

There has been a growing interest in and concern for the teaching of listening in the last 40 years. Looking back over the years, we can see how the emphases on teaching listening and the focus of listening instruction have changed. Although instructional practices were initially heavily influenced by models of the written language and a…