Abstract

Irish immersion primary schools have experienced significant increases in popularity since the early 1970s. Notwithstanding the myriad of celebrated benefits associated with immersion education in Ireland, it must be acknowledged that while immersion students can achieve near-native-like proficiency in relation to their L2 receptive language skills, a similar standard in L2 productive skills is regarded as less likely (Baker & Wright, 2021). With this, immersion students’ L2 has long been described as “linguistically truncated, albeit functionally effective” (Genesee, 1994, p. 5) implying that immersion students appear to communicate effectively but oftentimes, through inaccurate language use. Researchers speculate strong correlations between shortcomings in immersion students’ L2 acquisition process and the underestimated importance of the need for students to attend to and engage with the minority language during subject-matter and theme-based instruction (Tedick & Zilmer, 2020). Optimal language learning in immersion education is claimed to require careful attention to form within a meaning-driven context of specific content instruction (Tedick & Lyster, 2020). Research maintains, however, the nature of immersion teachers’ experience with attempting to intertwine form-orientated and meaning-orientated pedagogy in immersion is complex, important to study, but yet to be understood (Ó Duibhir, 2018).

Oral Corrective Feedback (OCF) may be described as an approach which supports students to notice and attend to their oral linguistic inaccuracies. Research suggests that OCF has the potential to support the integration of both language and content instruction which is regarded as a key component of effective instruction in immersion education (Ó Ceallaigh et al., 2019). While research in the field of OCF has gained much momentum among researchers and educators in the Irish immersion context over the past two decades, a comprehensive literature review of all such studies and their findings is yet to be conducted. One could argue that such a review is crucial to the future development and direction of OCF practices in Irish immersion contexts, both from a theoretical and practical perspective. The current paper aims to provide a literature review of studies that focus on OCF within the Irish immersion context. In doing so, the paper will define OCF, discuss the rationale for its inclusion in immersion pedagogy and provide a brief overview of the current international literature regarding OCF. Following this, studies investigating OCF within the Irish immersion context over the past two decades will be systematically reviewed and analysed. Findings from each study will be synthesised in an attempt to ascertain exactly what is known from extant studies in the Irish minoritised language context. The findings from the literature review will then be compared with those of international studies in an effort to unveil future directions of OCF policy, practice and research in Ireland.

Keywords: Immersion education; oral corrective feedback; second language acquisition; second language pedagogy