for Better Education
This volume celebrates linguistic diversity. It brings together work carried out in diverse geographic and linguistic contexts including Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States and highlights the efforts undertaken in these contexts to incorporate linguistic diversity into education and to harness it for learners’ benefit.
Research clearly demonstrates that incorporating linguistic diversity into education can lead to social, cultural, pedagogical, cognitive and linguistic advancement. In spite of this evidence, many educational contexts around the world are characterised by an unwillingness to commit to change and a stance that argues for exclusive use of a prescribed standard variety in the classroom. It is not unusual for such settings to indirectly discourage inclusion of varieties other than the prescribed standard, to ignore the existence of these varieties, or even to ban them from the classroom. Naturally, limiting the resources that learners from diverse linguistic backgrounds are allowed to use in the classroom tends to mitigate their experience of a meaningful education.
This volume challenges the largely anachronistic ideology that promotes exclusive use of an educational monolingual standard variety and advocates the use of aboriginal languages, minority languages, local languages, regional varieties, ethnic varieties, social varieties, nonstandard varieties, creoles, and pidgins in formal education. Permitting use of such varieties is a critical step towards equal linguistic rights. Together, the chapters of the volume serve as a forum in which the implications of linguistic diversity for education are explored. Historical and current practices for including linguistic diversity in education are addressed by considering specific bidialectal, bilingual and multilingual educational initiatives.
The following issues are treated in detail with special reference to educational contexts:
- linguistic diversity and linguistic rights,
- contact languages,
- minority languages,
- aboriginal varieties,
- nonstandard varieties,
- social, ethnic and regional varieties,
- non-native Englishes, and
- indigenous mother tongues in post-colonial nations.
The Commissioning Editors of the Oxford (UK) offices of the Peter Lang Publishing Group have reserved the right to publish this volume within their series entitled Rethinking Education. The volume thus seeks to re-think the way in which linguistic diversity in education is approached.
Incorporating linguistic diversity into education is not easy and a great deal of effort on the part of governments, communities, policy makers, educators and learners is required.
It is hoped that this volume will help to pave the way to more appropriate pedagogical policies and approaches and encourage the development of new curricula and learning materials that harness linguistic diversity.