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There can be significant diversity in the language experience of minority language children, and in the levels of proficiency reached. The declining numbers of children now exposed to Irish include those from homes where only/mainly Irish is spoken, those with only one Irish-speaking parent, and children from homes where one/both parent(s) speak 'some Irish', while levels of language use in the wider community also vary widely. The proficiency of children from Irish-speaking homes seems impressive compared with their L2 learner classmates, but still shows particular linguistic needs. Since acquisition of complex morphosyntactic features depends on both the quantity and quality of input, and extends well into the school years, assessing children's performance on features such as grammatical gender may provide a useful index of need for language enrichment, even among young speakers judged by teachers and parents to be fluent. We report data from 306 Irish-speaking participants aged 6-13 years from a range of language backgrounds, most of whom live in Gaeltacht (officially designated Irish-speaking) areas. Information was collected from parents on children's home language and new measures of receptive and productive use of grammatical gender marking in Irish were administered. Performance on these measures is compared with scores on standardised measures of Irish and English reading vocabulary, as well as teacher and parent ratings.

A central tenet of two-way immersion has been that the minority language children benefit from mother-tongue support in addition to instruction and interaction in the majority language (usually English) with their peers in high prestige programmes, while the English speakers gain valuable opportunities for peer interaction in their L2 with native speakers. Such mixing of L1 and L2 learners of the target language also occurs in minority language immersion programmes. This paper presents a qualitative study of L1 minority language children's output in such mixed groups by examining their language networks and use of the target language, Irish, in Irish-medium preschools or "naionrai" where they are interacting with L2 learners of Irish. Such networks are particularly interesting in the informal setting of preschool, where children have more freedom to move around and choose their interlocutor than in formal classrooms. This exploration of the children's output and their language choices raises pertinent questions about the needs of minority language children for direct L1 enrichment. This leads to an examination of aspects of the teachers' input to these minority language children in light of their linguistic needs and the evidence of contact phenomena in their output.