Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Bilingual Education 261integrative reasons for learning it. Although more likely to use moreFrench in personal encounters, immersion pupils tend to do no morethan the others to seek out or initiate such encounters. (It is true, ofcourse, that immersion students in many contexts will not have a greatdeal of opportunity to use their acquired fluency; this hardly applies inMontreal, however, the setting in which Genesee reports.) This onlyreinforces the observation that schools even immersion schools areunlikely in themselves to promote societal bilingualism; see Mackey(1981) and our earlier discussions.If we turn now to minority-group children, more the focus in this bookthan are ‘mainstream’ pupils, it seems safe to say that early education inthe mother tongue is beneficial; see also Hakuta (1991) for a usefultabular presentation of ‘research conclusions’, a list that he uses whenspeaking to groups about bilingual education. This is a bald statement,to be sure, and will require all sorts of qualification according tocircumstance and context. But a moment’s reflection will suggest thatan own-language alternative to a brutal sink-or-swim scenario must havea lot to recommend it, if only in terms of an increase in psychologicalcomfort and a decrease in the distress related to lack of understanding.These less tangible, less measurable elements are often left out of allthose research studies and ‘meta-analyses’: they are naturally concernedwith what can be mathematically assessed, but a tunnel vision can easilydevelop in which more qualitative aspects are increasingly ignoredaltogether. I don’t mean to imply, of course, that ‘quantitative’ researchersare themselves unaware that important matters remain out of thereach of their statistical nets, only that neglect can produce the sameeffects as ignorance. An interesting social-science development here hasbeen to try and refine those nets, and make them capable of catchingthings like self-esteem, happiness, security and so on. We are thenconfronted with the ludicrous spectacle of the ‘operationalization’ ofsuch intangibles with the inevitable result that whatever is measured intheir name is but a simulacrum (in the true sense of the word: a copywithout an original).An emphasis upon results is necessarily an emphasis upon thefuture if we do such-and-such now, what will the effect be later?While this is eminently reasonable, it does rather neglect things thatmay be desirable in themselves. I have already asked if we wouldremove swings and roundabouts from the playground if definitivestudies revealed that they had no measurable effect on post-primaryacademic achievement.