Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

A Concluding Statement 285I take no strong stand here, myself, but I would recommend that someof those committed scholar-activists at least pay more attention to sucharguments. At a fairly benign level, we could cite the example of Canada.Here is a country whose history, formidable geography and patterns ofsettlement have combined to bedevil the emergence of a broad nationalsensibility. Matters are exacerbated, of course, because of the proximity tothe American leviathan. Furthermore, the original British-French dualitythat once defined the country is increasingly overshadowed by the influxof immigrants from all parts of the world: Vancouver, Toronto andMontreal are now among the most multicultural of all cities. To considerthese variables, and to consider also the reasonable desire to movetowards a shared sense of ‘Canadian-ness’, must surely add some layersof nuance to all discussions of the value of an enduring multiculturalismand multilingualism. And, at an entirely less benign level, we see howrecent violent events in Europe have brought about renewed concerns forsocial ‘unity’, for the integration of immigrants and for the continuity ofimportant social values now seen to be under religious and otherpressures. Sometimes, of course, these concerns take very unpleasantand xenophobic shapes but when a tolerant community like TheNetherlands, for long a beacon of multicultural flexibility, begins toreassess matters, it is surely reasonable to suggest some renewedattention to general questions having to do with the accommodation oflinguistic and cultural diversity in liberal-democratic societies.The final two substantive chapters in this book consider bilingualismand bilingual education, both of which now have a very large and variedliterature. Some have found it interesting and perhaps a little perplexingthat, as a capability available to everyone of normal intelligence,bilingualism remains less prevalent than its usefulness might suggest.As with other features of the social life of language, however, the picturebecomes clearer when we take broader matters into account. I will returnto only three of them at this point. First, given patterns of cultural andlinguistic dominance and subordination, one should expect that bilingualismwill be an unevenly distributed quantity. Except in circumstanceswhere the languages in contact are of roughly equal socioeconomic clout,it is those whose varieties are less broadly useful, or less prestigious inimportant ways, who are most likely to expand their repertoires and tobecome bilingual (or better, of course). The speakers of the ‘bigger’languages generally need to make fewer accommodations. There are, ofcourse, exceptions throughout history, the educated classes, scholars,and others living relatively privileged lives have always learned foreignlanguages; these have often, of course, been ‘classical’ varieties, and only