Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

‘Foreign’ Languages in the Classroom 193emphasis upon schools as agents of Irish-language restoration, therearose a disjunction between official aims regarding Irish and actual,societal linguistic behavior. An ever-decreasing level of native competencehas been accompanied by an increasing minimal competence inbasic skills, produced entirely through education. It can therefore beargued that schools, and the attitudes towards Irish that they haveencouraged, have been of the greatest importance in the maintenance ofIrish (such as it is: see Edwards, 1977c; in preparation). It is worthpointing out here, by the way, that this brief treatment of the fortunes ofIrish takes us back to the minority-group scenarios previously touchedupon. Irish people in Ireland are obviously neither an indigenous nor animmigrant minority group; their original group language, however, hasbecome a minority variety in its own home, as it were. This points to aninteresting sub-division within the indigenous-minority category. If weconsider, say, the Indian ‘first nations’ of Canada, it is obvious that boththe speakers and their languages are of minority status; but if we look atareas like Ireland and Wales, it is equally clear that, while theautochthonous inhabitants are still in the majority in the land, theiroriginal varieties have become ‘minoritized’. This is because their landand their languages have come into contact with powerful neighbors andrivals. It follows that language-revival efforts in such settings will have aspecial poignancy. 1With even a minimal sense of the interactions among attitude,motivation and perceived necessity, it becomes easy to understand theproblems associated with teaching and learning foreign languages in thecontemporary anglophone context in Britain, in Australia and NewZealand and, above all, in North America. The difficulties arise becauseof contextual conditions having to do with power and dominance, andwith the fact that, in a world made increasingly safe for anglophones,there is less and less reason (or so it seems to many, students included)for them to learn any other language. Swaffar (1999: 1011) recentlymade some suggestions ‘to help foreign language departments assumecommand of their destinies’, and the usual suspects were pedanticallyrounded up: a redefinition of the discipline (‘as a distinct and sequencedinquiry into the constituents and applications of meaningful communication’),more emphasis upon communication and less upon narrowgrammatical accuracy, the establishment of standards, models andcommon curricula (for ‘consistent pedagogical rhetoric’) and so on. Allvery laudable, no doubt but why do I think of Nero? It has always beendifficult to sell languages in Kansas: wherever you go, for manyhundreds of miles, English will take you to McDonalds, get you a burger