Opportunities and Constraints of Community Language Teaching

Since 1976 the Commission of the European Communities, as part of its education action programme, has supported a number of pilot projects regarding the education of migrant workers' children in EC member states. This book presents the results of a case study that, as part of the European Communities Comparative Evaluation Project (ECCE Intercultural), was conducted on one of these pilot projects, the EC Pilot Project 'Community Languages in the Secondary Curriculum', which was carried out in London, Birmingham and Nottingham from 1984 to 1987. The case study consists of four parts. First of all, an analysis is given of the project's paperwork. This document analysis is followed by an account of semi-structured interviews with some of the project's key persons. A third activity has been the observation of community language classrooms in Italian, Urdu, Panjabi and Bengali together with observations of the position of community languages across the curriculum. A fourth and final activity has been a mail survey among community language teachers who were involved in the pilot project. Using the results of these four different data-gathering strategies, the book strongly argues for giving minority languages a more stable place in the curriculum and, as a consequence, for making schools more intercultural and more aware of multilingualism and linguistic diversity as positive starting points for teaching and learning.