Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Bilingual Education 257The third format here is one with which many readers will be familiar:mainstream classrooms within which there is some foreign-languageteaching: the three-times-a-week language lesson from Mme Chiasson orHerr Schmidt or, if the school can’t quite run to native-speakingteachers, perhaps Mrs Foyle and Mr Tanner do the honors, making surealways to stay a lesson or two ahead of the pupils. These are the familiarprovisions made in many educational regimes for majority-group youngsters.Baker places this format in the ‘weak’ division of bilingualeducation, arguing that the aim is, again, a ‘limited bilingualism’.Many readers will no doubt agree that something like ‘severely limited’or perhaps ‘crippled’ bilingualism would be nearer the mark, consideringthat 8 or 10 years of school French may enable you to rhyme off thepluperfect subjunctive of some irregular verb, but won’t allow you toorder a croque-monsieur and a Kronenbourg at the Brasserie Lipp.The four ‘strong’ varieties of bilingual education listed by Baker areunited in their aim of encouraging bilingualism. In ‘dual-language’programs (obviously not a uniquely distinctive description), bothminority- and majority-group children are in the same classroom, andboth languages are used. Well-known examples in the United States arethe Spanish-English arrangements first introduced in the early 1960s insouthern Florida. There are a great many variants under the duallanguagerubric: the most important variables are the amount of timegiven to each language, and the timing of each (by subject, on alternatedays, etc.). A second strong form is ‘heritage-language maintenance’education, designed for minority-group speakers. Here, the nativelanguage is used in the classroom, while the mainstream variety isgradually developed. A third is the ‘mainstream bilingual’ provision, inwhich majority-group children learn in two (sometimes more) ‘big’languages. As Baker notes, classic examples here are found in socialcontexts (like Singapore and Luxembourg) in which the general populationis bi- or multilingual, and in various types of ‘European’ or‘International’ schools catering for socially or educationally élite parentswho want their children to become bilingual.The final ‘strong’ form is ‘immersion’ education, in which majoritygroupchildren learn through a foreign language. The term was firstapplied to anglophone children in Montreal learning through French,but what was an educational experiment in the 1960s has spreadthroughout Canada, and beyond. Putting English-speaking children inFrench-only classrooms in Canada is not the same thing as placingSpanish-speaking children in English-only schools in America. Why?Most importantly, while Spanish is of minority status and, consequently,