Immigrant Pupils Learn English

This book reports on an in-depth empirical investigation of the English L2 development of 18 primary pupils in Ireland over the course of one school year.

It presents case studies which illustrate the often uncertain progress of pupils' language development and examines the wide range of variance across the sample. It also provides an analysis of the data as a whole, which reveals a number of regular patterns. The findings confirm that pupils' communicative capacity developed according to the functional trajectory proposed by the guidelines and derived from the CEFR; they also allow us to attach a great deal of linguistic detail to descriptors of underlying linguistic competence.