Many third level teachers of language at Irish universities come from very different learning contexts to those of their students. Their expectations of how language classes are conducted can be different from their students’ particularly in relation to target language use.

One study (Riordan 2015) found that the Irish education system advocates the exclusive use of the target language in post-primary language classrooms. As ever, there is a difference between policy and practice, and classroom observations found that teachers actually used the target language less than half of the time with some classes comprising less than 20% teacher target language use.

This section offers some reflective tasks to help teachers consider their own use of target language in the classroom with strategies for effective transitions to ever-increasing and appropriate target language use in the classroom.  In addition, this section also provides an overview of current research on this topic, within the context of third level education in Ireland.

See the table below for further information.

Context of use	Title	Related materials and themes
CPD activities
	Overview of target language use	The Language Learning Landscape in Ireland Exploring the Language descriptors following the CEFRL Exploring the “Can do statements” for the 5 Language skills following the CEFRL Analyzing: Developing critical reading skills
Activities for teachers to use with their students
	Creating comics in the target language	Participatory Literacy Hypertext Literacy Remix Literacy
Independent activities for students
	Self-assessing your language proficiency within the CEFR framework