Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

128 Language Diversity in the ClassroomIndeed, even limited gains within education ought not to be taken forgranted. A recent example of the volatility here is found in the rejectionsof bilingual education programs in some parts of America, the assertionbeing that bilingual education has gone too far in promoting andsustaining minority languages, that an undesirable balkanization mustbe resisted and so on. Flores (2005) discusses the links between suchprograms and linguistic disadvantage for the Hispanic children whoconstitute the great bulk of the bilingual education constituency inAmerica. Bedore and Peña (2008), Commins and Miramontes (1989),Delgado-Gaitan (1992), Gifford and Valdés (2006) and Jiménez (2000,2006) investigate further the continuing ‘deficit’ assumptions that aremade about Hispanic children and others whose maternal language isnot English by teachers and some researchers. Related events beyondthe schoolroom include the occasional but recurring efforts to formallydesignate English as the official language of the United States, and of thesuccess of such efforts at the state level. More than half of the 50 statesnow have official-English legislation. Several of these, it is true, havedesignated English as co-official with another language, as have someAmerican territories; in one case the Northern Marianas trilingualismis official (Chamorro, Carolinian and English).As well as acknowledging that reasoned academic argument may notalways penetrate as far or as quickly as we would wish, it is clear that the‘limited-gain’ argument I have cited above also applies within thehallowed groves themselves. The Feagans and Farran (1982) collection,already mentioned, brought together some well-known writers, all ofwhom were well aware of the latest research bearing upon linguisticdifference-and-deficit matters; well aware, that is, that the best psycholinguisticopinion of the time supported a ‘difference’ point of view. Yet,the editors noted in the preface that the deficit model became untenablenot only because of ‘new perspectives’, but also because interventionsbased upon it did not work very well. The possibility is held out, in otherwords, that only strategies were misguided, not underlying assumptions.One of the chapter authors (Blank, 1982) considers that both differenceand deficit approaches have difficulties, but fails to make clear that thedifficulties are not of equal force: the linguistic objections to thefundamentals of the deficit position are overwhelming, while the sortsof ‘difference’ problems she discusses have to do with the assessment ofappropriate ranges of skills for different social groups. 3Blank also suggests that deficit theorists have typically concernedthemselves with semantic issues, difference theorists with syntax. Again,this inaccurately weakens the anti-deficit case, for it implies that the model