Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

68 Language Planning and Education
theory that we have reviewed suggests that BE, understood as comprising the
development of the pupil’s L1 alongside the learning of English, is more likely than
alternatives such as English-only ‘structured immersion’ to promote higher levels of
educational attainment for linguistic minority pupils. That said, we recognise, with
Cummins, that BE is no panacea for the educational underperformance of certain
specific minority populations, the complex causes of which include the ‘coercive
relations of power’ to which Cummins (2000) refers.
The weight of the educational evidence supportive of additive BE is such that it
seems likely that at least some of the widespread opposition to it, evidenced in the
adoption of Proposition 227, is ideologically rooted. In the latter part of the chapter
we therefore explored the politics of BE, concluding that the dispute between
pluralists and assimilationists is only partly about the role of non-English languages
and cultures in the civic realm. At a more fundamental level, it is a struggle over how
the national identity of the United States is to be understood and defined.
At this level of abstraction, the debate has clear relevance for other immigrantreceiving
states such as Britain and France, since, despite obvious differences in the
socio-political context and in their demography of ethnicity, they too are grappling
with similar issues – how to accommodate linguistic and cultural difference within a
nation-state framework biased towards homogeneity, how to re-imagine the state
along more plural lines. And they too, like the United States, 22 are quite evidently
multilingual and multicultural in a demographic sense, yet not, to employ Parekh’s
(2000) distinction, so convincingly multiculturalist in outlook, in habit of thought.
NOTES
1. Ruiz’s much-cited three orientations are: Language-as-problem – an orientation that focuses
on the difficulties sometimes attributed to multilingualism (e.g. alleged socio-economic costs
and social divisions); Language-as-right, an orientation which focuses attention on the putative
rights of linguistic minorities to enjoy education and access to other public services in the
minority language; and Language-as-resource, an orientation which emphasises the social and
personal value in developing minority language skills.
2. The national origins quota system derived from the 1921 Immigration Act, which limited
admissions from each European country to 3 per cent of each foreign born nationality in 1910
(Schmid 2001). This tended to favour migrants from northern Europe.
3. The Spanish-speaking minority in the United States is heterogeneous, comprising subgroups
from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico and other countries in Central/South America.
4. Some authors prefer the term ‘English language learner’ to the official term ‘limited English
proficient’ on the grounds that the latter suggests an unduly negative view of linguistic
minority students, and fails to acknowledge their bilingualism and what they bring to
schooling, namely knowledge of their L1.
5. Public discourse in the United States distinguishes five meta-ethnic groupings: Euro-
Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos (or Hispanics) and Asian
Americans. As note 3 above points out, there is considerable ethnic/cultural variation within
these groupings.