Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

238 Language Diversity in the Classroomcontinue to be useful and valued; subtractive bilingualism, on the otherhand, usually occurs in settings in which one language is valued morethan the other, where one dominates the other, where one is on theascendant and the other is waning. 2 A third important contrast is thatbetween primary and secondary bilingualism, between a dual-languagecompetence acquired naturally, through contextual demands, and onewhere systematic and formal instruction has occurred. Finally here, somewriters have drawn yet another distinction: language acquisition is torefer to gradual or ‘natural’ linguistic development (in either first orsubsequent varieties), while language learning is to be reserved for morestudied and formal attainments (most typically, at school).These are not watertight compartments, of course. For instance, onemight pick up a fluently conversational grasp of a language in arelatively informal way, and later feel the need to add some readingand writing skills. Nonetheless, bilingual people in the Gaeltacht ofIreland or Scotland are obviously different from residents of Dublin,Glasgow or Edinburgh, who have more self-consciously set themselvesto become bilingual, and lumping these two groups together under asingle bilingual rubric might not lead to the most accurate descriptions.Becoming BilingualThe fact that a majority of the global population has at least some levelof multilingual competence surely indicates that adding a secondlanguage is not a particularly remarkable feat. English and Americanmonolinguals often complain that they have no aptitude for foreignlanguagelearning. This is usually accompanied by expressions of envyfor those multilingual Europeans, Asians and Africans, and sometimes(more subtly) by a linguistic smugness reflecting a deeply held convictionthat, after all, those clever ‘others’ who don’t already know Englishwill have to accommodate themselves in a world made increasingly safefor anglophones. All such attitudes, of course, reveal more about socialdominance and convention than they do about aptitude.Second-language acquisition has been dichotomized as simultaneousor successive. The first describes exposure to more than one variety fromthe onset of speech or, at least, from a very young age (somecommentators have suggested age three or four as a rather arbitrarycut-off), while the second refers to the addition of a new variety to anexisting one at a later age. Simultaneous acquisition most commonlyoccurs under the ‘one parent, one language’ heading principle: motherspeaks German to the child, father speaks English. There are some classic