Page 21 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

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helping people to obtain employment and increase their social status;
preserving ethnic and religious identity;
reconciliation and mediation between different linguistic and political communities; strengthening elite groups and preserving their privileged position in society;
giving equal legal status to languages with unequal status in everyday life; deepening the understanding of language and culture18.
Below I
and Anglo-American traditions.
briefly outline several types of bilingual education programmes implemented in Anglo-Saxon
Transitional bilingual education
In this type of a programme, students receive subject lessons in their mother tongue while intensively
learning the official language of the country as a second language. These programmes do not have a clear language policy, except that the language and culture of the majority are considered paramount. The role of the teacher is to prepare the learner for independent use of the second language, as the aim of this programme is to move from a preparatory class19 to a class where students will be deprived of the opportunity to learn their mother tongue or in the mother tongue. The mother tongue is only used at the beginning of learning to support the acquisition of the majority language. In these programmes, bilingual teachers who know the language of the minority pupils are employed. This form of teaching promotes monolingualism and the phenomenon of subtractive bilingualism, as the second language becomes the learners' first language. Typically, students remain in these classes from one to about three years. If one can speak of the advantages of this form of education, it would undoubtedly be the fact that the initial culture shock and alienation often experienced by children who move to another country are largely eliminated by the use of the child's mother tongue at the initial stage of education in the new environment.
Developmental/maintenance or enrichment education
This form of education mainly involves minority pupils who speak their first language at home and would like to further develop it, while at the same time developing proficiency in the dominant language. Subjects are usually taught in two languages, but the number of hours taught in one or another language is dependent on the number of minority language teachers and minority pupils in the class, as well as on the educational objectives of the individual subjects.
The aim of this form of education is to develop linguistic fluency in both the mother tongue and the second language. It is a model that can be used on a long-term basis. Students receive subject lessons in their mother tongue and additionally learn the official language of the country. The cultural values of the learners are also an integral part of this educational programme. It can therefore be described as leading to cultural pluralism and linguistic diversity. This educational model is also known as "heritage language education" in other countries.
18 Ferguson, 1977. In Baker, 2011, pp. 207–208.
19 In Poland, foreign students, for example from Ukraine, are assigned to preparatory programs created for them at the initial stage of their education in Poland, which is in accordance with the 2017 Act of the Ministry of Education, and in practice isolated from the other students in the school. Regulation of the Minister of National Education of 23 August 2017 on the education of persons who are not Polish citizens and persons who are Polish citizens who have received education in schools operating in the educational systems of other countries. Dz. U. 2017, item 1655.
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