Abstract
Across Western Europe, policy in the context of education for minority children has in the past 20 years increasingly stressed proficiency in and use of the dominant language as a condition for school success (in most cases, this has meant the ‘national’ language). The use of the children’s first language or home language(s) has been valued by policy makers as a cultural marker of identity, but not pedagogically as a didactic asset for learning, or as a ‘scaffold’ for the acquisition of the dominant language (Cummins 2011, 2013; Van Avermaet 2009; Extra and Spotti 2009).
The research reported here was funded by the Municipality of Ghent. The PIs were Piet Van Avermaet, Stef Slembrouck, Koen Van Gorp and Machteld Verhelst. We are especially grateful to Luc Heyerick, the then Director of the Local Education Department. He initiated the conversations and remained the driving force behind the Home Language in Education project during its implementation. We are also grateful to Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen for her detailed comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
When working on this project Van Gorp was affiliated to the Centre for Language and Education, KU Leuven – University of Leuven.
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Notes
- 1.
Some historical context is necessary here. Originally, the immersion model presented itself as a fast-track model for foreign language learning, which was at no point assumed to threaten functioning in a learner’s first language (cf. early immersion programmes for military personnel in the USA in the 1950s). In the present Flemish context, the idea of immersion for purposes of learning has been caught up in a rhetoric of fast-track integration through the use of the local, national language. As a result, immersion as a model of language learning became ideologically ‘cloaked’ and its many possible variants were lost sight of, for example, selective immersion (only some subjects), two-way immersion with mixed populations of L1 and L2 users of the two languages involved and so on. Immersion became a matter of ‘politics’ rather than of ‘pedagogics’.
- 2.
In passing, it must be added that we did not interview the children. Given the ages involved, it wasn’t easy to do this, but (admittedly) it is a gap in the research design.
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Slembrouck, S., Van Avermaet, P., Van Gorp, K. (2018). Strategies of Multilingualism in Education for Minority Children. In: Van Avermaet, P., Slembrouck, S., Van Gorp, K., Sierens, S., Maryns, K. (eds) The Multilingual Edge of Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54856-6_2
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