Managing Diversity in Education: Languages, Policies, Pedagogies(33 New Perspectives on Language and Education)

Diversity - social, cultural, linguistic and ethnic - poses a challenge to all educational systems. Some authorities, schools and teachers look upon it as a problem, an obstacle to the achievement of national educational goals, while for others it offers new opportunities. Successive PISA reports have laid bare the relative lack of success in addressing the needs of diverse school populations and helping children develop the competences they need to succeed in society. The book is divided into three parts that deal in turn with policy and its implications, pedagogical practice, and responses to the challenge of diversity that go beyond the language of schooling. This volume features the latest research from eight different countries, and will appeal to anyone involved in the educational integration of immigrant children and adolescents.

Table of Contents:
David Little, Constant Leung and Piet Van Avermaet: Introduction Part I 1. Jim Cummins: Language and identity in multilingual schools: Constructing Evidence-Based Instructional Policies 2. Tracey Costley and Constant Leung: English as an Additional Language: Symbolic Policy and Local Practices 3. Daniel Faas: Germany after the ‘Pisa Shock’: Revisiting National, European and Multicultural Values in Curriculum and Policy Discourses 4. Rachael Fionda: Teaching English to Immigrant Students in Irish Post-Primary Schools 5. Fiona Kearney: Inclusion or Invasion? How Irish Post-Primary Teachers View Newcomer Students in the Mainstream Classroom 6. Bríd Ní Chonaill: The Linguistic Challenges of Immigration: The Irish Higher Education Sector’s Response Part II 7. Bronagh Ćatibušić: Investigating the Development of Immigrant Pupils’ English L2 Oral Skills in Irish Primary Schools 8. Patrick Grommes: Investigating the Linguistic Skills of Migrant Students in the German Vocational Education System 9. Stergiani Kostopoulou: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Lexical Demands that Irish Post-Primary Subject Textbooks make on Immigrant Students 10. Zachary Lyons: Assessing the Impact of English Language Support Programme Materials on Post-Primary Language Support and Mainstream Subject Classrooms in Ireland Part III 11. Déirdre Kirwan: From English Language Support to Plurilingual Awareness 12. Sven Sierens and Piet Van Avermaet: Language Diversity in Education: Evolving from Multilingual Education to Functional Multilingual Learning 13. Nathalie Auger: Exploring the use of Migrant Languages to Support Learning in Mainstream Classrooms in France 14. Nelson Flores and Ofelia García: Linguistic Third Spaces in Education: Teachers’ Translanguaging across the Bilingual Continuum 15. Shelley Taylor: From ‘Monolingual’ Multilingual Classrooms to ‘Multilingual’ Multilingual Classrooms: Managing Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in the Nepali Educational System 16. Fie Velghe and Jan Blommaert: The Ecology of Mobile Phone Use in Wesbank, South Africa

About the Author :
David Little is Fellow and Associate Professor Emeritus at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. His recent publications include The Linguistic and Educational Integration of Children and Adolescents from Migrant Backgrounds (2010). Constant Leung is a Professor of Educational Linguistics at King's College London, UK. His recent publications include English - A Changing Medium for Education (2012, edited with Brian Street). Piet Van Avermaet is a Professor in the Linguistics Department, Ghent University, Belgium and Head of the Centre for Diversity & Learning, Ghent University. His research interests include diversity and social inequality in education, multilingual and multicultural education, and language and the integration of immigrants.

Review :
Linguistic diversity is a reality in classrooms all around the world. This volume shows an impressive picture of research, policies and praxis which take account of this challenge and support the transfer of plurilingual abilities into linguistic capital. It is an excellent overview for researchers as well as students, politicians and other experts in the field. Drawing on a wide range of expected and unexpected contexts (from the US over Europe to Nepal) and qualitative and quantitative projects, this book scrutinizes failing educational policies and approaches the issue of the empowerment of multilingual children and their path to educational, linguistic and cultural equity. A challenging book for policy-makers and support for educators and researchers. This book makes a timely and important contribution to the educational field, with its rich and detailed picture of diversity in its many forms - cultural, social, ethnic and linguistic - and its compelling argument that such diversity be used as a resource to improve learning for all, to help develop the competences we need to function successfully in our increasingly globalised and rapidly changing world.