Students' home languages and the struggle for space in the curriculum

Abstract

Although the importance of using students' home languages in education has been recognised for many years, home languages that are not official languages often struggle to find space in school curricula. This paper examines the ways that language-in-education policies influence the space available for non-official languages in the curriculum. It begins with a brief overview of the historical context that shapes how languages are understood in education. It then presents a critical review of some policies that allocate space to students' home language in the curriculum in order to examine certain ways that such policies both allow and constrain that space. It examines contexts that exemplify some of the key issues which students' home languages confront in educational settings, whether they are present as official languages or non-official languages, as a medium of instruction or a class subject. It then identifies some of the factors that contribute to the marginalisation of students' home languages in educational policy and practice.

Keywords:

• language-in-education policy
• non-dominant languages
• language ideologies
• multilingual education

Notes

1. The naming of languages in this context is problematic. In many cases, the languages involved are minority languages of indigenous or immigrant groups. In some cases, however, these languages may be majority languages in nations where the official language is actually a minority language. This is especially the case where former colonial languages have been maintained as the sole official language (Liddicoat & Heugh, 2014). In this paper, we use the term ‘home languages’ in the sense of home languages other than the official languages of a polity.

2. The exceptions are the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which is a Chinese-medium university, although it increasingly uses English, and the Hong Kong Institute of Education, which has a bilingual medium of instruction policy.

3. These students are primarily students who have migrated from another country, or those whose parents migrated, although funding is also available in this programme for the teaching of Australian Aboriginal languages.

4. Regional languages such as German were already included in the French curriculum as a foreign language subject, and received a greater time allocation as a foreign language than they would have as a regional language.