Multilingual Early Language Transmission (MELT) - Mercator ...

intergenerational transmission occurs by, for example, interventions with parents, health
visitors, midwives, as well as by language learning in school, adult language classes, and
literacy” (Baker 2003: 101). The MELT project and its products individually aim to make a
contribution in encouraging parents to make a well-informed choice and practitioners to
advise those parents as well as to guide the children on their way of a multilingual
development.
Traditionally a number of reasons are mentioned for the transmission of minority languages:
pedagogical motivations, cultural values, diversity of society and language maintenance.
First and most important of all, however, is the right of every child to become literate in
their true mother tongue, as declared in the Universal Declaration of Children’s Rights. It is
well known and often proven that the child’s chances of further cognitive development are
most completely guaranteed by a good knowledge of the mother tongue. This universal right
to mother tongue development, however, is much less accepted and less self-evident for
children in bilingual contexts and / or in families where non-national languages are spoken.
That situation, and in particular the aim of language development and maintenance requires
special measures in terms of infrastructure or provisions, and training programmes. These
aspects of language policy can help to fulfil the goals which are formulated for Welsh
children, but are of equal importance for all children living in a multilingual society: “For all
children, the essential aims of bilingual education in Wales should be: to develop community
fluency in the Welsh and English languages; to develop biliteracy in the Welsh and English
languages; to become multicultural and increasingly multilingual; and to have entitlement to
equal access to the potential economic and employment benefits of bilingualism” (Baker
2003: 104).
6.2 Development of smaller state and regional & minority languages in
education
The position of minority languages in education and the formulation of aims and goals shows
a development which can be characterised with the metaphors of stumbling stone, stepping
stone and corner stone. For a long time, regional minority languages were, and nowadays
immigrant languages still are, often considered stumbling stones which prohibit the children
from acquiring a sufficient knowledge of the standard language and their full academic skills
of reading and writing. Educational programmes used to neglect those languages, they didn’t
even use those languages as an assistant or support tool towards the learning of the
standard language. Later on, and also nowadays in some cases, both regional and immigrant
minority languages are being used in the starting phases of oral language development and
early literacy, but forgotten as soon as the serious aspects of education begin, in particular
teaching of reading and writing skills. This phase of transitional education can be
characterised as the stepping stone towards the mastery of the dominant language(s).
The position of the corner stone means that both the minority language and the dominant
language are taught and learned on equal footing, aiming at “full bilingualism, biliteracy”
(Fishman) at the end of obligatory school attendance. This position of equal corner stones
can be achieved only on the base of a number of conditions and measures, in particular
continuity of schooling and learning, starting from pre-school through primary school to
secondary education. The continuous development of bi- and multilingual children towards
the achievement of all language skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing) on the level
which is appropriate to the reference age of the children is often a challenge.
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