Language and Education in Multilingual Settings

by Bernard Spolsky (Editor)

Overview

The difference between languages that children learn in the home (their mother tongues) and the languages valued by society and established as the medium of instruction in schools is an almost universal problem in educational systems. Proposals for mother tongue education, for bilingual programmes of various kinds, or for more effective teaching of literary or standard languages all depend on an understanding of the underlying problem of language education in multilingual settings. The writers of Language and Education in Multilingual Settings do not have a single view of the issues, for they are international in background and experience, and interdisciplinary in training and approach; moreover, as will be clear, they differ in political and philosophical beliefs, in scholarly rhetoric, in research paradigms and in personal circumstances. In this book, researchers from India, Yugoslavia, the USSR, the USA, New Zealand, Zambia, Denmark, Australia, and Israel discuss practice and theory in various parts of the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780905028583
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	10/15/1986
Series:	Multilingual Matters , #25
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Professor Bernard Spolsky (1932-2022) During his long academic career, Bernard Spolsky made significant contributions to several areas of sociolinguistics including Educational Linguistics (he initiated and named the field), second language pedagogy, language testing, language policy, and language management. He was active in studying communities in the American Southwest, New Zealand, and Israel, in which the children’s home language was not the language they needed when they began school. He was particularly pleased that his first great-grandson, Noam, was being raised in Israel to understand and speak three languages.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
1. Bernard Spolsky: Introduction
2. D. P. Pattanayak: Educational Use of the Mother Tongue
3. Melanie Mikes: Towards a Typology of Languages of Instruction in Multilingual Societies
4. M. N. Guboglo: Factors Affecting Bilingualism in National Languages and Russian in a Developed Socialist Society
5. Barry Mclaughlin: Multilingual Education: Theory East and West
6. Richard A. Benton: Schools as Agents for Language Revival in Ireland and New Zealand
7. Robert Phillipson, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Hugh Africa: Namibian Educational Language Planning: English for Liberation or Neo-colonialism?
8. J. J. Smolicz: National Language Policy in the Philippines
9. Christina Bratt Paulston: Linguistic Consequences of Ethnicity and Nationalism in Multilingual Settings
10. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas: Who Wants to Change What and Why - Conflicting Paradigms in Minority Education Research
11. Bernard Spolsky: Overcoming Language Barriers to Education in a Multilingual World