CPS – 03

LANGUAGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

(Madam. Linthoingambi Devi)

UNIT – 1: LANGUAGE BACKGROUND OF STUDENTS

Understanding multilingualism in the classroom

Multilingualism in the classroom:

Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages,
either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers
outnumber monolingual speakers in the world’s population.

Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of

globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated
by the internet, individuals’ exposure to multiple languages is becoming increasingly
frequent, thereby promoting a need to acquire additional languages. People who speak
several languages are also called polyglots. As far as learning a language, multilingual
speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-
called first language (L1). The first language sometimes also referred to as the mother
tongue is acquired without formal education, by mechanisms heavily disputed. Children
acquiring two languages in this way are called simultaneous bilinguals. Even in the case of
simultaneous bilinguals, one language have been reported to be more adept at language
learning compared to monolinguals. Additionally, bilinguals often have important
economic benefits over monolingual individuals as bilingual people area able to carry out
duties that monolinguals cannot, such as interacting with customs who only speak a
minority language.

Home language in Classroom:

• To encourage students to see connections between their language and thus to
better understand how languages are structure and organized, talk to students
about their home language and ask them
• How is the home language the same and how it is different from English?
• Are there words in the home language that sound the same and mean the
same thing in both language?
• Are there words in the home language and English that sound the same but
mean different things?
• As part of phonological and metalinguistic awareness exercises to facilitate reading
acquisition, ask students:
• to say words that start with the same sound(s) in English.
• How words are changed and form in the home language – singular and plural forms,
present tense and past tense forms of verbs – to enhance their word language.
• Who are new to your class, to read books in their home language to show you what
they know about reading.

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 By using the collective skills and knowledge of all students in the classroom, even a
monolingual teacher can tap into these valuable language resources that students have
and do so with the confidence that these methods will promote their language
development – in English as well as the home language.

School Language in Classroom:

The Indian education system is truly multilingual in its character. The Bombay
Municipal Corporation runs primary schools in 9 languages. The Karnataka runs primary
school in 8 language. The secondary schools in West Bengal give their students the option
to choose from 14 languages. The three-language formula widely in the country aims at
developing and strengthening the multilingual character educational system.

There are many problems if implementing the three – language formula. For
example, there is no reference to the classical language and foreign languages. Tamil Nadu
teaches only Tamil and English, and Gujarat follows it with Gujarati and Hindi. Many Hindi
states substitute Sanskrit, a classical language for a modern Indian language. With the
expanded version of the eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution, more languages are
added to the mix, but there is hardly any improvement in the situation.

There are 500 Central Schools with the bilingual medium consisting of English and Hindi.
There is also a compulsory language, Sanskrit in addition. There are 500 Navodaya
Vidyalayas where some competence in English and Hindi is imparted simultaneously. But
the students, who graduate from these schools go to the English Medium colleges,
because there is no college in the country that offers bilingual medium of instruction. The
Indian education system blocks multilingualism as one moves into higher education.

Role of Home Language and School Language in Classroom Instructions in the Classroom
• Summarising what they just read, heard or learned: Teachers prompt students to
share with a partner important details about what they just studied or read. For
example: “ Tell your partner three important details from the text you just read”.
• Discussing background knowledge and experiences: Students can discuss
experiences they have had that relate to the topic in some way. For example; students
night discuss the following prompt: “Talk about a tie when your parents or caregivers
told you to do something, and you really didn’t want to do it. How did you feel about
that? What did you do in that situation?”
• Brainstorming: Students discuss, or write ideas around a particular subject.
• Quick-writes: Similar to brainstorming, students write as much as they can in a short
amount of time about a particular subject or topic.
• K-W-L: The K-W-L chart lists what students know, want to know and learned about a
particular topic. When implementing the K-W-L, students can discuss or fill in the K-
W-L in a small group with peers who speak the same language, and cart their
responses. If an instructional aid or parent volunteer who speaks the home
language(s) of the students is available, he/she can assist in this process.

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• Reading materials: If reading materials are available to students in the native
language, reading them may help to build background, increase reading skills or clarify
concepts.

• Homework and home-school connections: Students can share what they are learning
or learn about cultural perspectives in relation to the content through discussion with
family members. When students’ home language and culture is validated, it benefits
students’ social-emotional well-being, and can instill confidence and nurture risk-
taking when speaking in English.

In sum, there are benefits to allowing students to use their native language for
instructional purposes in an otherwise English-speaking classroom. Teachers must follow
the best teaching methods when students practice the content vocabulary and academic
language.

In all classrooms, English learners benefit from sheltered instruction practices that
help to learn content while developing English proficiency. Sheltered instruction practices
such as:
• Providing comprehensible input during instruction
• Building in students-to-student interaction opportunities to build oral fluency and
for clarification and processing of key concepts
• Linking to students’ prior experiences
• Building background knowledge
• An explicit focus on developing academic English

All of these practices benefit English learners in particular and each students in
general. The strategic use of students’ native language should be considered as an
important and useful scaffold and instructional tool.

Power of Language:
As always, when “power” is spoken of, the first association is that of the power of
man over man, of power as suppression of the free will by “commands” and “obedience”.
Power can easily appear in this connection as the root of all evil in human societies and as
the opposite of freedom as such.

Yet the problem of power is in truth more complex. And especially in the case of
the “power of the language”, the problem is multi-layered. The “power of language” not
only means language in the service of power; language can also undermine power. And
above all, as language, it possesses itself power of a very special kind. The relation of
language and power is ambivalent.

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 We have spoken in the first place of the “power of language” as the “language of
power”. What is here meant in general is that all power must finally use language, be

conveyed through it and manifested in it, to command, this is, to speak, where others must
only hear and obey. In a more narrow sense, this understanding of the “power of
language” is a matter of the instrumentalisation of language itself becomes a means of
power: as political rhetoric and demagogy, as ideology and bedazzlement, as seduction
through words, as “persuasion”. This power of language extends from large political
contexts, from the manner of speaking and thus also of thinking that dictatorships and
totalitarian orders force upon dominated people, to the

small scenes of everyday life, to the arts of seduction of advertising, the sales tricks of
telephone marketing, or the menacing undertones at the workplace or in the family.

This first interpretation of the “power of language” already shows two things. On
the one hand, that language and speaking must be distinguished in the exercise of power.
The possibilities of language from the way in which language is actually used in spoken
words. On the other hand, the interpretation also gives a presentiment that the power
which is exercised through language always already bears within itself the germ of its
counter-power. For the language of political demagogues and tyrants can be seen through
as language. And by means of language itself. So that language conveys the power of
violence or domination and at the same time undermines it.

For everyone can take possession of the power of language and in its way see
through and unmask the power exercised through language. Seen clearly, the “power of
language” is thus not the fraternisation of language with command and obedience; this
uses language for goals other than those which are inherent in it. The genuine, inner power
of language is rather to undermine this other kind of power. At exactly this point begins
the improvement through language that marks the work of the Goethe Institute. It is an
empowerment through the genuine power of language, not through a specific content or
body of knowledge which is conveyed through language. And it is within this frame that
the decentralized, world-wide projects of the Goethe Institute are to be understood.

Dialect Theory:
In Linguistics, dialects are the variants or varieties of a language used by different
speakers who are separated by geographic or social boundaries. As with other languages,
different cultures can express themselves in different dialects, which is the first
proposition of dialect theory. The second proposition is that the presence of dialects has
the potential to make recognition argue that dialects but not languages should allow basic
mutual comprehension as even small changes in language can create confusion. A minimal
pair which consists of ‘two forms with distinct meanings that differ by only one segment

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found in the same position in each form’ are easily confused with each other when
enunciated differently, sometimes through very small shifts (Eg; ship/sheep).

Deficit theory:
Linguistic deficit theories hold that certain linguistic varieties are inherently
superior and that children who are raised in environments where such varieties are lacking
will acquire deficient of thought, resulting in deficits which will have to be corrected in
order for them to be able to participate fully in society.

Broughton et al (1978) define deprivation Hypothesis as “the sociolinguistic view

that some children are linguistically handicapped because they belong to social groups
which have a poor linguistic repertoire”. Similarly, Bernstein (1977) takes the Deficit
Theory to be “a set of propositions which attempt to account for educational failure by
locating its origins solely in surface features of the child’s family and local community”.

The former definition is confined to linguistic deficiency whilst the latter ascribes
educational failure in general to the background of the child.

In an attempt to explain deficiencies in lower socioeconomic students’ success rate,

some researchers in the 1990s began to postulate that failure among those students
occurred because there was not sufficient verbal foundation in the home for success (Eller.
1989), Eller rightly adds that all children who enter school “are highly competent language
users…” but because of language and cultural diversity, they may not always be in a
position to demonstrate their diversity, they may not always be in a position to
demonstrate their abilities. Eller told the difficult truth, that “their language may be
perceived as deficient”.

Discontinuity Theory:
Both a continuity approach and a discontinuity approach exist in the debate of the
origin of language. The continuity approach has a Darwinian perspective of language
suggesting the potential for language to have evolved from more primitive forms of animal
communication. This theory makes a connection between our human language and the
rather advanced forms of animal communication such as bird and whale songs.
Experiments were conducted in Chimpanzee with respect to learning of sign language.
Researchers found that the chimpanzees were able to communicate with lab staffs and
fellow chimpanzees and their own off springs using sign language they thought.

However the approach of discontinuity depicts language as too complicated

to have ever come from mere animals, expressing that language is unique to humans and
far more complex than other forms of communication on earth. Noam Chomsky defends

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this position and suggests the concept of a ‘language organ’ or ‘language device’. Chomsky
suggests that language could be due to a sporadic mutation in our species and not evolved
from the lower level species and their primitive forms of animal communication. According
to Chomsky (1968) ‘human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without
significant analogue in the animal world. If this is so, it is quite senseless to raise the
problems of explaining the evolution of human language from more primitive systems of
communication that appear at lower levels of intellectual capacity’.

The essence of discontinuity theory is that the developed full-fledged language

faculty of human beings are not a product of Darwinian evolution, but a unique
development occurred to the human species.

The advocates of continuity claims (e.g. Lock, 1980), that ‘words develop as direct
transformations of gestures’. But discontinuity approach argues that gesture, as a
‘primitive system’ plays no role in the acquisition of language.

Discontinuity theory is more discussed with respect to learning of grammar. The

emphasis of continuity approach is on communication as a continuous domain of
development language might get its grammatical structure form. Those who see language
as being mostly innate, such as Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition,
whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as
Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication, either
primitive gestural or vocal communication.

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