Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education 211at the federal level. Further details about ‘Official English’ and itsramifications can be found in Chapter 13 (see especially note 5 there).Historical perspectivesMulticultural matters are important in many contexts, but they areobviously magnified in settings of greater ethnic diversity. They areparticularly salient, then, among the immigrant and ‘guest-worker’populations of western Europe, and are of even more longstandingprominence in the new-world ‘receiving’ countries, including Canada,the United States and Australia. All of these owe their contemporaryexistence to successive waves of immigrants and, although each beganwith dominant immigrant populations, their recent histories have beenmarked by great variation among incoming groups. As I noted in the lastchapter, more than half of all the schoolchildren in Toronto (where thepopulation of the greater metropolitan area is now almost five million)come from homes where neither French nor English is the mother tongue.We have already seen that policies in late 19th- and early 20th-centuryAmerica were strongly assimilationist, both linguistically and otherwise.The process began at Ellis Island, in New York harbor, where the names ofimmigrants were often changed. While it is a myth that brutal abbreviationsand alterations were imposed by unfeeling and monolingualimmigration officers, and while many changes resulted from the immigrants’own attempts to make their names more ‘American’ in one wayor another, there is little doubt that the process was seen on all sides asboth desirable and practical. After all, the languages of the new arrivalswere often seen as exotic, unpronounceable and inferior to English. Thefamous melting-pot popularized by Israel Zangwill (1909) was at full boil.But Zangwill’s democratic notion that all the immigrants would be giventhis fiery baptism, and that all would emerge as newly minted Americans was never the reality. Beyond the fact that some immigrant groups, aswell as the indigenous peoples of the continent, were unwilling toundergo immersion, racial prejudice meant that many would be refusedsuch immersion anyway. Slightly less obvious was the fact that some totalamalgamation à la Zangwill was never on the cards: only some identitieswere to be melted down and re-cast. Assimilative forces were to bebrought to bear upon certain categories of newcomers, whose task it wasto accommodate themselves to an existing mainstream. That is why theterm anglo-conformity is more apt not only in the United States, butin Australia and in most parts of Canada than some metaphor of acrucible in which all would be mixed, and from which would emerge,