Narratives in Manx: Linguistic strategies in immersion acquired language

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show linguistic strategies used in constructing a narrative task by the first children acquiring Manx Gaelic in a language immersion education programme. The children in the study were approaching the end of their third year of the immersion programme. It was expected that the children would use their first language (English) as a resource for their second language production in terms of lexical and semantic transference. It was also expected that the small number of children in the study who had other Manx speakers in their family would show some advantage in terms of language production over those who did not. The findings discussed in this paper show that in addition to using their first language as a resourcethe children were also able to use their knowledge of the target language productively. Any advantage in language production shown by children with Manx speaking family members was slight, and only became apparent when diversity in verbal noun usage was taken into account. The Manx of second language adult speakers, and that of the last native Manx speakers, which shows some interesting parallel usage with the children’s language is referred to as a point of comparison.