Part II.pdf - MTB-MLE Network

language teaching methods.” True bilingual education is also used in this article to refer to mother
tongue-based bilingual education in order to differentiate it from bilingual education “in name only.”
Submersion education is the opposite of using the learner’s mother tongue in education, and it
refers to the use of a medium of instruction that the learner does not speak or understand. Usually
submersion education takes place when minority children with limited proficiency in the majority
language are put into majority language classrooms without any provision for accommodating or
alleviating the learners’ disadvantages that result from not knowing the language (Baker 2001,
195-198; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, 582-587).
Language development is a part of language planning or what Spolsky (2004) calls language
management. Language planning – in its simplest form – can be divided into three parts: status
planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning (CAL 2001; Cooper 1989; Deumert 2001; Kaplan
& Baldauf 1997; Robinson 1999; Wright 2004). Status planning refers to language policy, for
example, decisions about which languages are used for official and educational purposes. While
corpus planning refers to the development of orthographies, i.e. writing systems and the
standardisation of language use. In this article, language development of local languages refers
mainly to corpus planning. Acquisition planning refers to approaches used to help people learn
languages.
Ethnolinguistic minorities can be defined as nations, nationalities, or people. For the purposes of
this discussion, ethnolinguistic minority refers to a group of people who: (a) share a culture
(or ethnicity) and/or language of their own that distinguishes them from other groups of people;
and (b) in terms of numbers, are fewer than the predominant group(s) of people in the given state.
May (2001) provides an excellent and thorough discussion of these issues. For the purposes of
this article, language rather than ethnicity is the determining factor. If someone does not speak the
national or official language or the language of the dominant group of the state as one’s mother
tongue, one can be considered a member of an ethnolinguistic minority. Ethnolinguistic minorities
may either be indigenous or they may be more recent migrants to the given nation. Furthermore,
it is assumed that language – the first language of the learner, in particular – is a far more critical
factor in educational achievement than ethnicity, as such (e.g. Baker 2001; CAL 2001; Cummins
2000; Dutcher & Tucker 1996; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Thomas & Collier 1997, 2002).
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