Irish has significant State support, but lacks a research base to support the teaching of Irish reading. Current approaches to teaching Irish reading are presented, and outcomes summarised. Issues of consistency and complexity in Irish orthography are discussed in light of an analysis of a corpus of early reader texts, and the formulation of rules…

Study of the effect of supplying audio tapes to accompany leisure reading books in Irish found that the tapes considerably increased native-English-speaking elementary school students' motivation to read, facilitated comprehension, and increased the children's reading rate and pronunciation accuracy. (36 references) (Author/CB)