Language Education and Culture

Abstract

The findings from many studies illustrating the vitality and importance of linguistically and culturally diverse learners’ worlds outside schools conducted throughout the last few decades of the twentieth century provided the foundation for the development of several innovative approaches to language education that can be subsumed under the broad framework of culturally responsive pedagogy. This pedagogy is based on a key premise that considers the different worlds that linguistically and culturally diverse learners bring with them to the classroom to be rich reservoirs of resources to draw on rather than sources of deprivation and thus obstacles to overcome. Thus, exemplary educational programs seek to build on rather than replace the languages and cultures that learners bring with them to school. One recently developed approach that fully incorporates contemporary perspectives on language and culture is the pedagogy of multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996; see also Kalantzis and Cope, Language Education and Multiliteracies, Volume 1). The approach was proposed by a group of ten scholars from the USA, England, and Australia in response to what they consider to be two important challenges to education. The first is the ever-increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of communities around the world. Such diversity, they argue, not only means “that there can be no standard.” ( p. 10). It also means “that the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects. . .hybrid cross-cultural discourses; the code switching often to be found within a text among different languages, dialects, or registers; different visual and iconic meanings; and variation in the gestural relationships among people, language, and material objects” (ibid.). The second challenge is the increasing creation and spread of multimodal means for communicating within and across these communities.