1. Bilingualism and Language Education in
French Primary Schools: Why and How
Should Migrant Languages be Valued.
Heliot, C & Young, A (2002)
Diana Diaz Benavides & Michael Robayo

3. LANGUAGE POLICIES IN
EDUCATION
«France is not a monolingual country, countrary to widespread
opinion. Its future lies in the respect of cultural and linguistic
diversity and the development of multilingualism»
•Priorities given to languague teaching (FLT)
• European languages has an important status
•Languages spoken by immigrants are categorized as
languages of origine (MLT) Children are shooled through
french at early age (2 )
•Children are not allowed to use the home language in the
school (migrant languages are obstacled to the acquisiton of
French) for those migrant communities french is not the second
language.
•Speaking a migrant language does not account for bilingualism concept.

4. Educational Context
«Leave your language at the door»

5. NEGATIVE PERCEPTIONS OF
BILINGUALISM
• Children have difficulties in learning French because
they speak ML at home
• Unacknowledge of research in Europe about
education of minority languages.
• The lack of ML recognition (since it is part of their
identity, affects children’s affective and learning
development)
• Code switching and code mixing is understood as
children linguistic confusion
• Teachers’ attitudes towards the ML
• The homogeneous perspective of diversity
• The bilingualism is possible for those who learn
pretigious languages.

6. Which language(s) should I
speak in the classroom?
• You are an English teacher of a very diverse
class with students from all over the world.
You have a wide variety of Hispanics,
including students from Colombia, Venezuela,
Central America, Cuba, and Mexico. You also
have Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, Persian,
Russian, Japanese, and African students.
Which language will you use to teach a topic
in your class bearing in mind that you also
know Spanish?

7. For the first few weeks of the class I translated new vocabulary to Spanish for the
Hispanic students. Then, I explained the new vocabulary to the other students as best
as I could in English.
Though, the school director is an adament proponent of English only. I stopped the
practice and returned to an English only policy.
But I have since re-examined the issue. Should other languages be completely banned
from the classroom? I have decided that the answer is a firm "no." Banning use of
other languages in the classroom creates a "sink or swim" atmosphere. The drop-out
rate at this particular institution was high. I could see that in most instances the
students who dropped were those who felt lost and confused in an English only
environment.
When I started a new class, I resolved to undertake a new strategy. By this time I had
expanded my knowledge of languages to include languages from all around the
globe.
My new strategy revolved around teaching in all the different languages of my
students for the first week or two while repeating everything in English. It also
included welcoming the students on the first day in their native languages. The
Chinese and other Asian students especially were pleased and amazed at the fact that
their teacher know some vocabulary of their native language.

8. Linguistic and Cultural Diversity
Education
History and context of the project
Objectives
Implementation
Methodology
Evaluation after one year (2000/2001)
Language awareness as a complementary model to
language learning
conclusion

15. ACTIVITY
• Imagine you have a bilingual
course with children in the
Amazonas. Their parents are
indigenous people who speak
several indigenous languages,
spanish, and portuguese. And
you have to teach them
English because of the PNB.

16. DISCUSSION
• What kind of activities would you
propose to integrate the languages and
not only to teach English in the context
mentioned above?
• What do you know about education in
departments such as Amazonas, Choco,
el llano, San Andrés?
• Do we have Migrant Languages in
Colombia?
• How many languages are spoken in
Colombia? Which ones?

17. • Language spoken by people of
Colombia: 101 of them as many as 81
are still spoken in the country.
• Some of them: Achagua, Arhuaco,
Cams, Carijona, Desno, Guayabero,
Piaroa, Piratapuyo, Siona, Tariano and
Totoro.
• Official language = Spanish
• Achagua spoken by the people who live
in the eastern region of Colombia. It
belongs to the group of languages
called Maipurean Arawakan language
group.
• Extinct languages: there are 21, among
these: are Andaqui, Barbacoas,
Chipiajes, Omejes, Ponares, Runa,
Natagaimas, Cauca and Anserma.