The fifteen articles in this volume are generally concerned with the role of vernacular language in bilingual education on an international scale. They examine specific nations and how bilingualism affects their social milieu. The following articles are included: (1) "Bilingualism and the Vernacular," by Shana Poplack; (2) "The…

The history of American education is marked by attempts to grapple with the U.S. multilingual and multicultural situation. Bilingual education can be traced from the time of the first migration from Asia which formed the strain of the native American, through the migrations from Europe and Africa, to the influx of immigrants from all over the…

A part of the Southwest Board of Cooperative Services, Project SUN (Spanish, Ute, Navajo) is a multilingual, multicultural program for children in grades K-3. (KM)

Noting that reading development is a crucial factor in breaking down social, intellectual, and political barriers, this paper uses Nigeria as an example of a developing multilingual country in order to examine the problems and challenges that learners and educators in multilingual societies face. The discussion is focused on children at the…

This conference report of a UNESCO meeting concerns the aspects that are essential in planning and implementing a second language teaching program in a plurilingual context. The relevance of the following kinds of factors are described: (1) the variety of plurilingual contexts; (2) the specific didactic components of teaching a second language in…

The linguistic situation in Nigeria might be represented as a pyramid with a base composed of 400-500 native languages of which about 100 have been alphabetized. Of these, 51 with more than 100,000 speakers each, are considered regional languages; ten, with more than 1 million speakers each, are considered inter-regional languages; and three…

This paper deals with the cultural attitudes which one either learns or inherits as a speaker of English. It is a discussion of the attitudes observed as a student of English, in the use of English as an international and auxiliary language, and in the teaching of English as a second language. As English becomes an international language,…

Belgium is a multilingual country divided into three linguistic areas: (1) the Flemish-Netherlandic speaking area in Flanders; (2) the French-speaking area in Wallonia; and (3) the German-speaking area in the East of Wallonia. An educational experiment on English as a foreign language (EFL) in the primary school was undertaken at the Educational…

This work attempts to provide an overview of linguistic diversity in South Asia and to place this diversity in a cultural context. The work tries to describe the current state of knowledge concerning socially conditioned language variation in the subcontinent. Each of five major language families contains numerous mutually intelligible and…

In classifying bilingual education following William F. Mackey's typology, single or dual media or instruction may be used for gradual or abrupt conversion to a wider or narrower culture. Bilingual education in the United States is usually dual medium, either for maintenance or conversion to a wider culture, aiming to produce a bilingual…

The present volume is designed to help the student of child language, especially the beginning student, discover the high points of American and international research, such as French, German, Hebrew, Polish, and Russian. The selections in this reader are intended as an introduction to various fields of child language and to different theories and…

This paper discusses the historical conditions and socio-political factors affecting the development of Japanese language schools in Hawaii. It traces the development of these schools from the time they were established to prepare Japanese children for their eventual return to Japan through years of legal battles and disfavor to the present, when…

The problem of interference caused by linguistic transfer in second language learning does not increase with the number of languages that the student has acquired. The ability to learn a second, third, or fourth language depends on what Chomsky calls "the language acquisition device," which is a capacity or a sensitivity formed by a combination of…

Describes language lab listening activity designed to serve needs of the English as a second language class comprised of students at different levels of language proficiency, divergent native languages, multicultural backgrounds, and varying levels of formal education. Multilevel tasks are drawn from a common text, allowing students to do…

To be an English teacher today is to play an inevitable part in the globalizing of English. This volume canvasses important questions for English language teachers that are posed by the phenomenon of a global English: (1) Whose language? English speakers today are more likely to use English with multilingual speakers than with monolingual…