Language Development In Multicultural Education

2.0 INTRODUCTION

Language development happens both inside the classroom (as part of a formal establishment, school or institute) and outside it. The classroom is generally considered a formal setting, and most other environments informal, with respect to language learning. “In environments where informal language development is adequate, it is possible to regard the formal classroom as supplemental, complementary, facilitating and consolidating”(Van Lier, 1988: 20). For second-language development in such environments the informal settings can be regarded as primary and the formal classroom as ancillary. The L2 lesson then becomes a language arts lesson, focusing on special language skills and cognitive/academic growth, much in the same way

Questions of abandoning or maintaining one’s home language affects education policy in all immigrant receiving nations. Because of the consequences of colonisation, migration, nation-formation, traditions of exogamy, and modernisation, some degree of bilingualism is typical of most people in the world.” Today the most advanced nations realise that they can no longer be ignorant of the languages and cultures of other people on this planet. This is why bilingual-multicultural education was initiated. It was believed that this approach will build closer ties between the students’ community, their language background, and the educational plan of the school. The students will develop pride in themselves and their heritage.

Thus, the psychological and cognitive aspects involved in learning of two or more languages in an educational setting, the challenges of linguistic planning and the translation of information across languages is what we shall discuss elaborately in subsequent sections. I shall attempt to provide on the one hand an overview of L1 learning, and on the other hand some ways in which this relates to L2 learning in a

The worries articulated by parents and educators relate to the children’s ability to differentiate the linguistic system, the possibility of significant delay in the rate of acquisition, and possible deviations from developmental paths observed in monolingual acquisition.

Volterra and Taeschner (1978) proposed a three stage model of bilingual language development. They argued that initially the child is unable to distinguish two different systems .According to this model a child begins with a single linguistic system, which is gradually separated into two.

• In the first stage of the model, the child’s system consists of a single lexical system which includes words from both languages .This entails the idea that the child has only a single word for any lexical item or concept.

• In the second stage of the model, the child separates the two lexicons, but maintains a single set of syntactic rules for both