Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

252 Language Diversity in the Classroomintegrated with pre-existing and ‘non-bilingual’ curricula? Shouldbilingual education be available to (or, indeed, required of) all students or just the brighter ones? Should it be extended across a broad rangeof pupils, or designed principally for those whose mother tongue isa ‘minority’ one, or a variety that will not adequately serve in all areasof life?Varieties of Bilingual EducationWhen a large number of possible student populations, in a largenumber of different sociocultural contexts, is combined with variouseducational policies and desired educational outcomes, it is not difficultto understand the emergence of many types of bilingual education. Infact, Mackey (1970) listed almost 100 categories and sub-categories; seealso Fishman’s approaches here, as summarized by García and Schiffman(2006). It is Baker’s (2006) typology that I shall draw upon here, however:it is easy to understand and quite comprehensive. 1 He lists 10 broadpossibilities, including, for the sake of completeness, three non-bilingualeducational settings in which minority-group children have often foundthemselves. Before we turn to these, however, we should note that themost basic of ‘programs’ is no program at all: children are simply putinto existing mainstream classrooms, and left to sink or swim.Not swimming, but drowningThe American setting is broadly instructive here. We find, first of all,that many leaders railed against any departure from the traditionalmainstream classroom, a situation in which children must adapt to theschool, while the latter remains essentially unchanged. Presidents fromTeddy Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan have argued for an Americanlinguistic and cultural crucible in which ‘dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse’ emerge as unhyphenated, English-speaking Americans, andagainst any educational provisions ‘dedicated to preserving [immigrants’]native language and never getting them adequate in English’. 2It may seem odd at first blush, but it is also easy to find similarsentiments among American immigrants themselves: many members ofU.S. English, an organization dedicated to making English the officiallanguage of the United States, are themselves immigrants. This is oftennoted as evidence that the organization ought not to be seen as a narrow,chauvinistic and linguistically intolerant body but the psychology issurely interesting. I cannot delve deeper here, other than to point to oneor two possibilities. 3 It may be, for instance, that immigrants who have