Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Chapter 1IntroductionL’école est un curieux lieu de langage. Il s’y mélange les languesofficielle, privée, scolaire, des langues maternelles, des languesétrangères, de l’argot de lycéen, de l’argot de la cité. Àconsidérertoutes ces langues qui cohabitent, je me dis que l’école est peut-être leseul lieu où elles peuvent se retrouver dans leur diversité et dansleurs chevauchements. Mais il faut être très vigilants et justement tirerpartie de cette belle hétérogénéité. (Steiner & Ladjali, 2003: 8384)A Brief RationaleAmong my other academic activities and duties, I have been givingtalks to teachers and teachers’ organizations since the early 1970s. Thesehave typically dealt with the points of intersection among education,social class, ethnolinguistic status and group identity. Such topics, withall their many ramifications, have always been of great interest toteachers, since they are so obviously relevant to the daily life of an everincreasingnumber of classrooms. Whether it is a matter of accepting orrejecting nonstandard dialects or foreign languages at school, of adaptingclassrooms to language diversity or attempting to maintain a strictmonolingual regimen, of seeing school as a contributor to social changeor as a supporter of some ‘mainstream’ status quo, of arguing the meritsof ‘transitional’ versus ‘maintenance’ programs of bilingual education, ofembracing multiculturalism or recoiling from it in all these matters, theknowledge, sensitivities and attitudes of teachers are of no smallimportance.And yet, over three decades or so, I have been amazed anddisappointed at how ill-prepared teachers typically are with regard tolinguistic and cultural variation in the classroom. The education ofteachers generally involves very little exposure to this sort of heterogeneity,and yet it is easy to see that it has made its presence felt invirtually every global setting. Even schools in ‘traditional’ and ruralareas whose populations were historically both local and stable are1