The Language of the Playground: Activists Building Consensus on the Language Policy and Ethos of a New Gaelic Immersion School

As an alternative pedagogical model, additive immersion education is clearly a success; by a range of measures and in a variety of contexts, students in immersion schools have been shown to equal and even surpass the attainment of their mainstream peers (for research on attainment in Scottish Gaelic immersion see: Johnstone et al. 1999; Highland Council 2009; O’Hanlon et al. 2013). However, as a tactic for language revitalisation, the efficacy of immersion education is far less certain; while students may attain reasonable communicative competence in their classroom language, that competence does not always translate into much social use of the...