Languages under attack?

Hornberger (1998)

The paper starts by discussing the need for policy and education to preserve and sustain indeginous and immigrant languages, which the authors feel are "under attack" (p439) - in the USA in particular, and may hae been true elswhere at the time of writing. They give the example that there are 175 indigenous langagues, of which only 20 are being "transmitted as child languages" (p3). I assume they use "transmitted" to mean "formal instruction", rather than informal instruction in the parent to child form. Apparently endangered languages have received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. They give many examples of programs to improve te use of languages throughout the world, holding the South African constitution, which recongnises 9 national languages and gives provision for more, as the paragon on bilingualism. Also give are examples of Govermernt policy and societal pressure for a single language.

In developing billingual education, the author believes that it is best developed in a way which makes the minority language a resource for the majority language speakers, rather than just a right of the minority language speakers. A bilingual school in the USA is given as an example. This school has a policy of billinguistic use of Spanish and English and this is embedded in the school curriculum, teacher pedagogy and social relations at the school. In practise, this was not entilrely acchieved, for example the school district standardised testing was only in English, the Spanish language students achieved a greater degree for billingism than the English speaking students. What they achieved was a school which promotoed, and gave, the rights of a minority language group while teaching the majority language students a second language. In my opinion, this is still a great achievement.
Kura Kaupapa Maori, community based schools in New Zealand were given as an example of language and cultural revitalisation, however these sound like immersive schools and therefore not billingual. However, I think the Education Foundations textbook may contain imformation on the movement towards English/Maori billingual schoools in New Zealand.
A study by Crease in the UK reports that "language rights of the children rarely became a priority equal to the content-based aims of secondary education"  (p454) and trying to change the system was viewed as a deficit thinking by the billingual students.

"A serious commitment to provision of the rights for children to be educated in their own language requires a systemic and systematic effort, which cannot necessarily be handled by an add-on program or policy." (p454)