“Miss, who needs the languages of immigrants?: Leading increasingly linguistically diverse London schools
This study has in its title words of a 15-year-old bilingual student that summarise her experience of the value attached to minority languages. As a Kurdish and Arabic speaker, a recent arrival from Iraq, new to English and somebody with the ambition to work in tourism this student reflects on the usefulness of her two languages by saying: “Miss, who needs the languages of immigrants?. Within 11 months of living in London this student has adopted a low value message in relation to minority languages.Her question is captivating in its grasp of issues of inequality and marginalisation. The fact that young people choosing the direction of their future occupation in a global city such as London are not encouraged to explore how the skills they have in different languages can be used as resources are ultimately issues of equal oportunity and social justice. In the case of younger bilingual learners, excluding language skills they have in languages other than English in everyday learning creates predictable pedagogical difficulties which may result in patterns of educational underachievement. Engaging with bilingual parents, students and teachers with little awareness of the benefits of bilingualism has initiated a search for factors resulting in the low value attached to certain types of bilingualism. Working on the hypothesis that prevalent practice is influenced more by attitudes to bilingualism rather than relevant research and pedagogical theory, this research focuses on attitudes. This small-scale qualitative study conducted with a group of London headteachers provides an insight into the attitudes to bilingualism and how they impact on policy and practice in schools with significant proportions of multilingual learners. It also raises the question if schools which claim to suport multilingual students in realising their full potential can achieve that without including home languages as an integral part of learning.
Dina Mehmedbegovic
London Education Research Unit, London Centre for Leadership in Learning,Institute of Education, London
国际会议
北京
英文
1-19
2008-11-11（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）