Understanding Irish Spelling: A Handbook for Teachers and Learners

The focus of this handbook is to describe systematic patterns of spelling in Irish that can be explicitly taught to help pupils relate written Irish words to what they already know of spoken Irish. However, our ultimate goal is to facilitate and encourage Irish reading as a supplement to the classroom experience of spoken Irish, to increase exposure to the language and to build vocabulary and grammar knowledge. This handbook is not a comprehensive course on reading pedagogy, but we hope that it will help to provide teachers with some ideas for approaching the teaching of the relationship between Irish spelling and pronunciation,and perhaps help to enhance their confidence in their own understanding of the orthographic system of Irish. If any readers are dubious about the value of such instruction, we discuss that too, in the next chapters.