Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

262 Language Diversity in the ClassroomTransition and maintenanceMany of the questions surrounding bilingual provisions for minoritygroupchildren deal essentially with programs that are either transitionalor maintenance in nature. As we have already seen, supporters of bothvarieties hope to ease the earliest passage of children from home toschool, and thereby defuse some educational difficulties. They allsubscribe to the famous UNESCO (1953: 11) dictum that holds that ‘itis axiomatic that the best medium for teaching a child is his mothertongue’.We should note that there have been dissenting views. Gupta (1997)points out that, in some multilingual settings, it can be difficult todetermine the mother tongue (recall the simultaneously trilingual GeorgeSteiner here). In contexts of dialect variation, it may be that the ‘mothertongue’ to be used in the classroom will be perhaps has to be astandard form quite unlike the nonstandard variants of the pupils and, inheterogeneous settings, mother tongue education may mean separateprograms for different ethnic groups, a potentially divisive and undesirablesituation. D’Souza’s (2006) discussion of the very complex Indiansituation is also instructive here. Apart from echoing Gupta’s point aboutthe very determination of a mother tongue what is the mother tongue,she asks, for children who have no home, and who are forced to learn thelanguage(s) of the streets? D’Souza notes that the instructional mediummust often be the dominant language in the state. Wee (2002: 285286)has discussed the issue as it affects people in Singapore; he writes, forexample, that ‘it is entirely possible for some Chinese Singaporeans toagree that Mandarin... is their mother tongue, but at the same time to beunwilling to consider themselves native speakers of Mandarin’.Even Phillipson (1992), whose career has been devoted to uncoveringa linguistic ‘imperialism’ and ‘linguicism’ that serves the ‘large’languages of the world at the expense of the ‘small’ ones, has feltobliged to record that not providing English-medium education toAfrican-language-speaking children was interpreted locally as a colonialistdesire to maintain groups in subordinate positions. (To ignoreindigenous languages altogether can be equally insensitive, of course.)We have already seen here how parents themselves may reject maternallanguageeducation for their children. Sometimes this is based on a moreor less accurate assessment of the relative worth of competing varieties,and sometimes it reflects a regrettable ignorance of the possibilitiesinherent in some sort of bilingual program; in all decisions, however,we must acknowledge that the children’s best interests are uppermost