6. Education as a Site of Language Contact

Abstract

This chapter reviews the multidimensional research on bilingual education, covering contexts where bilingual children are in transitional classrooms as well as schools where curriculum content is experienced in two (or more) languages. Bilingual education has become a major tool in language reversal planning, since language transmission within families within minority languages typically provides a considerable shortfall in language reproduction. To play its part in language reversal, bilingual education needs to show its relative effectiveness, both as an educational approach and for language maintenance planning. Immersion and dual language approaches have increasingly demonstrated such success. However, bilingual education is neither a universal panacea for language planners, nor is it effective purely due to dual language classroom approaches, as recent research reveals. Such research locates the political nature of bilingual education, not only at the level of policy making, but also in qualitative research in classrooms. It illuminates how language and literacy practices can latently legitimate and reproduce unequal relations between language majorities and minorities. Emerging directions in bilingual education research include trilingual education, the bilingual education of deaf students, the consequences of information technologies for bilingual classrooms, and the effect of the internationalization of English on language contact in schools. This reflects an international interest for research at the varying levels of philosophy, policy, provision, practice, and not least the politics of education as a site of language contact.Research on education as a site of language contact has become multidimensional and multidisciplinary. 1 Such research includes sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics, philosophy and pedagogy, classroom practice and provision, local and national policy formulation, and not least ideology and politics. Bilingual education (used in its widest sense) is not just about a school with a dual language policy, provision for children who speak an immigrant or minority indigenous language, or how two languages are distributed in teaching and learning in classrooms. Bilingual education is a central part of national or regional language planning that, on some occasions, seeks to assimilate indigenous and immigrant minorities, or integrate newcomers or minority groups. On other occasions, bilingual education is a major plank in language revitalization and language reversal (e.g., 96 COLIN BAKER

Towards a cross-linguistic pedagogy

“…This was the case for the English-and French-dominant student participants in the study reported on here. One might assume that this situation is unique to this particular research context, but it has been documented in content-based language programs in a number of international contexts such as the Spanish Basque country (Cenoz, 1998), Cataluña (Artigal, 1997), Ireland (Hickey, 2001), Wales (Baker, 2003), and finally, the United States, where two-way immersion programs purposefully enroll students of complementary language backgrounds, in part so that they can better learn one another's language and culture (Lindholm-Leary, 2001). …”

An investigation into CLIL-related sections of EFL coursebooks: issues of CLIL inclusion in the publishing market

“…Listening in particular is downplayed and therefore we may conclude that CLIL may be equated to the reading of trivialised content when, in fact, secondary school students may demand complex texts and significant listening development through authentic sources (Banegas 2013). This exposes the poor response of international CLIL-oriented coursebooks to weak forms of bilingual education (Baker 2003;Leung 2005).…”

‘You’re looking at this different language and it freezes you out straight away’: identifying challenges to parental involvement among immersion parents

“…While there are networks of Irish speakers in the country, these are largely dispersed, and as a result the opportunities for immersion (and mainstream) students to use the language in real communicative settings outside of school are very limited (Murtagh 2007). This, in turn, entails a limitation in the richness of language to which pupils are exposed, but it is also likely to depress their motivation to use the language as a result of being mainly or wholly associated with the school curriculum and not with peer culture (Baker 2003).…”