Language Minority Education in Great Britain: A Challenge to Current U.S. Policy

Abstract

British educational policies advocate placing language minority students in mainstream classes where their regular teacher receives ongoing support from a TESOL specialist. By contrast, in the United States, the policies favor placing nonnative speakers in separate programs such as ESL pull-out classes, sheltered English, or bilingual education, where they are taught solely by the TESOL or bilingual education specialist. The same rationale—protecting equality of opportunity—is offered for both approaches. This article compares the events that led to the contrasting solutions and the institutional structures that support those solutions; it gives an example of the British mainstream system at work and shows how the different approaches to educating nonnative speakers reflect different assumptions about language development and definitions of equality of opportunity. The article concludes by asking language teachers three questions about programs for language minorities that are raised by the contrastive examination: (a) What are the consequences of social segregation in educational programs? (b) What are the effects of varied instructional contexts on language learning? (c) What are the most helpful roles ESL teachers can play with respect to teaching subject matter and linguistic competency?