Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Multilingualism and L2 learning
Regardless of whether they have more than one official language, most countries
contain large numbers of people who use other languages. According to the
Eurydice network (Eurydice, 2005), in Europe, ‘8 per cent of pupils aged 15 say
that at home they speak a language other than the language of instruction.’ While
England uses one language for official purposes, a survey of London found that 32
per cent of children spoke languages other than English at home and that 300 
The different roles of second languages in people’s lives 197

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different languages were spoken (Baker and Eversley, 2000). Some countries nev-
ertheless consist almost entirely of speakers of a single language: 121 million of
the 127 million inhabitants of Japan speak Japanese (Gordon, 2005). Others con-
ceal a variety of languages under one official language. Of the 60 million people
in France, 1.5 million speak Alemannisch, 1.2 million Arabic, 0.5 million Breton,
0.5 million Kabyle, and so on (Gordon, 2005). In Vancouver, where 46 per cent of
the population are immigrants, undoubtedly more bilinguals speak Chinese
alongside English than French, and in Toronto 4.9 per cent of the inhabitants
speak French at home (Gardner, 2007), despite English and French being the offi-
cial languages of Canada. In the year 2000, 47 million US residents over the age of
4 spoke a language other than English at home, that is, one in five of the popula-
tion (US Census Bureau, 2003); this trend has led to a worry about the continuing
status and importance of English.
Mobility also plays a part in multilingualism. Some countries, for one reason or
other, include static populations of speakers of different languages, sometimes
called ‘internal colonies’. The UK has had speakers of Welsh, Gaelic and English
for many centuries. According to Ethnologue (Gordon, 2005), 24 languages are
spoken in South Africa, 415 in India and 102 in Vietnam. In many cases this
multiplicity of languages reflects the arbitrary borders imposed on various coun-
tries in modern times. Much was the historical result of conquest or movement of
people; the empires of Islam and France led to Algeria having speakers of French,
Arabic and Berber; the legacy of the British Empire and trade led to Malaysia hav-
ing speakers of Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese, Indian languages and various indige-
nous languages, amounting to 140 in total. Recent changes in such groups have
sometimes consisted of people going back to their homeland; ethnic Germans
returning to Germany, Turkish-speaking Bulgarians returning to Turkey, and so
on. A balance between the languages in one country has often been arrived at,
though not necessarily with the consent or approval of the speakers of the minor-
ity languages: children were at some time forbidden to speak Basque in Spain,
Navajo in the USA or Kurdish in Turkey; Koreans in Japanese-occupied territories
had to adopt Japanese names; the Turkish minority in Bulgaria had to use
Bulgarian names. Indeed, deaf children in England (the use of sign language by the
deaf being a form of multilingualism that is often forgotten) have often been
made to sit on their hands in class to prevent them using sign language.
The past few decades seem to have accelerated movements of people from one
country to another, as refugees, such as the Vietnamese, as immigrants, such as
Algerians in France, or as migrants looking for work, such as Moroccans in
Germany or Poles in England and Ireland. This has created a vast new multilingual-
ism. New York is said to be the biggest Gujarati-speaking city outside the Indian
subcontinent, Melbourne the largest Maltese-speaking city in the world. An Indian
student born in Uganda said to me that the first Indian city she had lived in was
the London suburb of Southall. A wealth of languages are spoken in every
European town today, regardless of the official language of the country; Turkish is
spoken in London or in Berlin or in Amsterdam; Arabic can be heard from Paris to
Brussels to Berlin; in the west London suburb of Ealing 20 per cent of children
speak Punjabi, 10 per cent Hindi/Urdu and 6 per cent Gujarati (Baker and Eversley,
2000). In some cases, these people are temporary birds of passage, intending to
return to their country once the political or economic situation changes – Polish
taxi drivers in most English cities, for example. In most cases, they are permanent
citizens of the country, with the same rights as any other citizen, like Finnish-
speaking citizens of Sweden or Bengali-speaking citizens of England.
The goals of language teaching
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In many cases, such multilingualism is bound to be short-lived. Paulston (1986)
describes how immigrants to the USA from Greece and Italy become native speak-
ers of English over three or four generations. In her view, such a shift from minor-
ity to majority language is prevented only when there are strong boundaries
around the group, whether social or geographical (Gaelic in the Hebrides), or self-
imposed (the Amish in the USA, who speak Pennsylvania Dutch), or when there
is a clear separation in social use of the two languages (‘diglossia’), as in Standard
Arabic versus local versions of Arabic in North Africa. Having one’s own ethnic
culture as a minority group means speaking the language of that culture, usually
different from the majority language, but not necessarily so – as in the use of
English by many Scottish nationalists. Language, then, is often part of ethnicity,
and hence associated with political movements for the rights of particular groups.
Indeed, this extends to the rise of heritage languages in some minority groups,
which may not currently be spoken by any of the members; the Confucius
Institutes that are springing up around the world for the teaching of Chinese have
found that one important group of students consists of Chinese speakers of other
dialects wishing to learn Mandarin.
Joshua Fishman (1991) has described this intergenerational shift as a Graded
Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), which has eight stages. At the first stage,
a language is used for some ‘higher-level’ government and mass media, for exam-
ple, but does not have ‘political independence’; an example might be Swiss
German. At the second stage, the language is used in the ‘lower’ levels of govern-
ment and media, but not ‘in the higher spheres of either’. And so on until stage 7,
when the users of the language are old and ‘beyond child-bearing age’, but still talk
to each other, such as some speakers of old Italian dialects in Toronto. And it ends
with stage 8, when the only language users left are socially isolated and need to
transmit their language to people who can teach it to a new generation, like speak-
ers of some Aboriginal languages in Australia or speakers of Cornish in Cornwall.