Language Diversity in the Classroom (Bilingual Education & Bilingualism) - Softcover

Edwards, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847692257 ISBN 13: 9781847692252

Verlag: Multilingual Matters, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

This book provides comprehensive coverage of language contact in classroom settings. A thorough analysis of the sources and implications of social "disadvantage" is presented first, since the nonstandard dialects that children bring with them to school - and the unfavourable perceptions of these dialects - have traditionally given rise to educational difficulties. The persistence of these perceptions is particularly highlighted. More general issues surrounding the range and implications of language attitudes are dealt with, as is the important "test case" of Black English. The book also discusses foreign-language teaching and learning, as well as the assumptions and intentions underpinning bilingual and multicultural education. Given its breadth and its style, this book should be of interest and value to all teachers, as well as to students and researchers concerned with any aspect of the social life of language.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Edwards is a Professor of Psychology at St Francis Xavier University. His research interests are in language, identity and the many ramifications of their relationship. He has lectured and presented papers on this topic in some thirty countries. Professor Edwards is the editor of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. He is the author of several books including Language and Identity (Cambridge, 2009) and Un mundo de lenguas (Aresta, 2009) as well as many articles, chapters and reviews.

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Language Diversity in the Classroom

By John Edwards

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2010 John Edwards
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-225-2

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction, 
Chapter 2 Discourse Analysis and its Discontents, 
Chapter 3 Disadvantage: A Brief Overview, 
Chapter 4 Disadvantage: The Genetic Case, 
Chapter 5 Disadvantage: The Environmental Case, 
Chapter 6 The Language Debate, 
Chapter 7 The Persistence of Linguistic Deficit, 
Chapter 8 Evaluative Reactions to the Language of Disadvantage, 
Chapter 9 Black English as Ebonics, 
Chapter 10 'Foreign' Languages in the Classroom, 
Chapter 11 Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education, 
Chapter 12 Bilingualism: A Very Brief Overview, 
Chapter 13 Bilingual Education, 
Chapter 14 A Concluding Statement, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

L'école est un curieux lieu de langage. Il s'y mélange les langues officielle, privée, scolaire, des langues maternelles, des langues étrangères, de l'argot de lycéen, de l'argot de la cité. À considérer toutes ces langues qui cohabitent, je me dis que l'école est peut-être le seul lieu où elles peuvent se retrouver dans leur diversité et dans leurs chevauchements. Mais il faut être très vigilants et justement tirer partie de cette belle hétérogénéité. (Steiner & Ladjali, 2003: 83–84)

A Brief Rationale

Among my other academic activities and duties, I have been giving talks to teachers and teachers' organizations since the early 1970s. These have typically dealt with the points of intersection among education, social class, ethnolinguistic status and group identity. Such topics, with all their many ramifications, have always been of great interest to teachers, since they are so obviously relevant to the daily life of an ever-increasing number of classrooms. Whether it is a matter of accepting or rejecting nonstandard dialects or foreign languages at school, of adapting classrooms to language diversity or attempting to maintain a strict monolingual regimen, of seeing school as a contributor to social change or as a supporter of some 'mainstream' status quo, of arguing the merits of 'transitional' versus 'maintenance' programs of bilingual education, of embracing multiculturalism or recoiling from it — in all these matters, the knowledge, sensitivities and attitudes of teachers are of no small importance.

And yet, over three decades or so, I have been amazed and disappointed at how ill-prepared teachers typically are with regard to linguistic and cultural variation in the classroom. The education of teachers generally involves very little exposure to this sort of heterogeneity, and yet it is easy to see that it has made its presence felt in virtually every global setting. Even schools in 'traditional' and rural areas whose populations were historically both local and stable are now more and more confronted with children from many different backgrounds. The geographical spread of Spanish speakers throughout the USA — far beyond the initially adopted settlement areas of Florida and the southwest — is a case in point, as is the widening distribution and permanence of the European 'guest workers', as is the exploding mobility that has now brought hundreds of thousands of east Europeans, as well as African and Asian refugees, to countries in western Europe; and so on. I have also discovered that many jurisdictions have essentially denied a diversity that was always there, a reflection of a sort of socially imposed ignorance. Thus, for example, when I began research work in Nova Scotia, it was immediately clear that prevailing perspectives made little room for longstanding groups of low social status. In some schools, there were sizeable groups of African-Canadian youngsters, descendants of those who came to Canada during the American Civil War, along the 'underground railroad', or who had been given land grants in return for service in the British army; in others, there were Acadian children of French-speaking background. An inability or an unwillingness to see such groups as anything other than very minor aberrations in an essentially English/Celtic mainstream had the predictable consequences.

Even if there was no great likelihood of teachers encountering social or linguistic diversity in their classrooms (increasingly implausible as this would seem), I think that a good case could still be made for giving much more attention to such diversity. In this book, I will argue that all good education worthy of the name is multicultural and, if this is so, a logical implication is that any heightening of teachers' cross-cultural and cross-subcultural sensitivities must be a good thing.

Finally here, it is important to note that expanded sensibilities are not at all difficult to bring about. The matters under discussion in this book are not rocket science. To take one example: the evidence that Black English dialects are just as valid as any other English variants, that they are just as rule-governed, that their patterns of pronunciation and emphasis are just as regular, that they serve the cognitive needs of their speakers just as well as any other form of speech does — all this and more can be presented to, and understood by, anyone who has an open mind. I know, because I have made presentations to teachers and teachers-in-training, as well as to hundreds of senior students in language seminars. So much the worse, then, that so many are still left to labor under stereotyped, inaccurate and potentially harmful illusions. As I shall shortly point out, poor and socially disadvantaged children have very real burdens to bear; it is an unnecessary further tragedy that their linguistic and cognitive skills should be misunderstood or denigrated. The consequences, in terms of impediments to learning, early curtailment of formal education and reduced chances in the world beyond the school gates can be enormous.

Sympathetic Voices

There have been several contemporary calls for the sort of attention I hope to highlight in this book, as well as earlier ones demonstrating the longstanding nature of the issue. There has, for instance, been a number of recent works arguing for greater and more precise attention to the teaching of foreign languages, and almost all these works stress the importance of the ideological framework within which this occurs. Unlike earlier and more linguistically focused treatments, these later ones encourage a broader sociolinguistic and sociocultural contextualization (e.g. Osborn, 2000; Reagan & Osborn, 2002). Their very existence, of course, testifies to a continuing need. In the American context, the need is particularly evident where Hispanic children are concerned: Flores (2005) presents a rather chilling chronological table in which the assessments of the 1920s — a time when Spanish speakers were sometimes judged to be mentally retarded — have now become condemnations of bilingual education programs that prevent the most efficient acquisition of English. (Flores' table can be interestingly set against another, provided by Baker [2006], which charts the rise and fall of language programs in the USA.) A recent small-scale example demonstrates the continuing tendency for alleged language deficiencies to be taken as evidence of underlying cognitive weakness (Commins & Miramontes, 1989). In another setting, Hélot and Young (2005:...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Multilingual Matters
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1847692257
• ISBN 13: 9781847692252
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 348
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland