Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

‘Foreign’ Languages in the Classroom 203‘language and cultural needs of students... should be catered for’(Ireland, 1998: 118), a declaration that would seem to bode well for thenew immigrants. Of course, as Wallen and Kelly-Holmes (2006: 144)observe, the statement precedes the most recent waves of immigration,and was meant to apply to the language needs and wishes of Irishspeakers in an educational system that has traditionally been bilinguallyminded, with room for both English (the language of everyday life) andIrish (officially the ‘first language’). Nonetheless, there is a point of entryhere that could be exploited for those wishing to argue for ‘educationrights in languages other than Irish and English’. Of course, even with theinflux of Latvians and Lithuanians, of Brazilians and Congolese, the Irishscene is nowhere near as linguistically diverse as others. I mention thecontext here, however, because it reveals just how dynamic the politics ofdiversity can be: who would have guessed, even a dozen years ago, thatquestions of language-in-the-classroom would be important in the Irishcontext?A new collection edited by Hornberger (2005) deals with heritagelanguageteaching in American and Australia. And a collection of papersassembled by Creese and Martin (2006a), treats ‘complementary’ schoolsin England. Sometimes referred to as ‘community’ or ‘supplementary’schools, these are voluntary efforts that stress mother-tongue education,and they occur outside regular school hours. While no one would denythat particular religious or ethnolinguistic groups have a perfect right tomake such arrangements for themselves, the most interesting questionhere apart, of course, from pedagogical and linguistic effectiveness iswhether or not such groups should be obliged to do so. Creese andMartin (2006b: 1), for example, take the position that complementaryschooling is a ‘response to an historically monolingual ideology whichignores the complexity of multilingual England’. The implication is that amore enlightened system would and should have made provision for thechildren within the ordinary curriculum; see also Li Wei (2006) for somecogent discussion of the most important points.The Canadian experience is again illustrative here, and it is the onethat has generated the greatest and the most sustained interest. This isbecause the country has both indigenous and immigrant populations,because it also has uniquely among ‘receiving’ countries of the newworld two ethnocultural ‘mainstreams’, and because its largest citiesare probably the most multicultural in the world. Official statistics (seeDepartment of Canadian Heritage, 2000: 5) reveal that, in 1996, 48% ofthe population in all Canadian metropolitan areas reported ‘at least oneethnic origin other than British, French, Canadian or Aboriginal’. In the