Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

Literature / 31

children would end up having to learn In a language unknown by their
teachers (Bull,1964).

The success of the Canadian Immersion Programmes contradicts the UKESCO
position too, but several of the preconditions for immersion programmes
for L2-medlum learning do not exist in underdeveloped countries, where
situations seem more likely to produce submersion type of programmes,
i.e. those which were found the least successful (Skutnabb-Kangas,1983).
Indeed, in some rural areas it would be more adequate to call the L2 a
'foreign' language, as the opportunities to use it outside the classroom
are so reduced.

Vhlle challenging the misconception that 'the mother tongue is always the
better medium for learning', the Canadian experience does not prove that
a certain method to teach the L2 for L2-medium learning is effective,
but rather that language, cognitive ∙nd pedagogical variables are
insufficient to account for differential school progress in bilingual
situations (see the debate in Rivera,1984). The success of the Canadian
experience, like the lack of success in mother tongue learning by Blacks
in South Africa or by Turk immigrants in Vest Germany, point to the
fact that the поп-replicability of their results (taking the language of
Instruction as the independent variable), is not a limitation but the
major lesson to be learnt.

It is not the intention of the present study to review the variety of
language policies and the formats of bi∕multi-lingual programmes in
underdeveloped countries: it is the interdependency between method and
aim, the definition of minorltiy and majority in terms of power
relationship and the criterion chosen for the definition of bilingualism
that situate educational programmes along many different typologies of
what is summarily called ^rbilingual education*. Examples of typologies are
the works of Flshman (1968, 1972), Skutnabb-Kangas,(1983), and others
reviewed in the latter. For the characterization of the situation in which
the subjects of this study find themselves as children and as pupils, see
Chapter 3).

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