Channel View Publications

The difference between languages that children learn in the home (their mother tongues) and the languages valued by society and established as the medium of instruction in schools is an almost universal problem in educational systems. Proposals for mother tongue education, for bilingual programmes of various kinds, or for more effective teaching of literary or standard languages all depend on an understanding of the underlying problem of language education in multilingual settings. The writers of Language and Education in Multilingual Settings do not have a single view of the issues, for they are international in background and experience, and interdisciplinary in training and approach; moreover, as will be clear, they differ in political and philosophical beliefs, in scholarly rhetoric, in research paradigms and in personal circumstances. In this book, researchers from India, Yugoslavia, the USSR, the USA, New Zealand, Zambia, Denmark, Australia, and Israel discuss practice and theory in various parts of the world.

Wales is a small nation with a long and varied tradition of bilingualism. The minority language and culture is under threat. The book seeks to take the temperature of the Welsh language. Building on a computer analysis of the 1981 Welsh language Census data, the book provides evidence of a language moving slowly towards extinction. The aim of each chapter is to examine an issue which is of significance in most minority language situations, but is exemplified and encapsulated in the Welsh context. The effect of television and other mass media, the potential and threat of the microelectronic revolution, the existence and erosion of heartlands are issues which are part of the nervous tension of contemporary Wales and many other minority language regions. The role of bilingual education is a central issue of the book. A bilingual education model is described as a basis for analysing some of the problems and issues of Welsh and worldwide bilingual education. Another chapter analyses different approaches to curriculum development in minority language contexts and argues for a dual approach combining central initiatives and teacher based action research. Regional variations in the policy and provision of bilingual schooling in Wales are portrayed, and two further chapters present recent research into Welsh education. This research points to the crucial nature of immersion and active participation in the minority culture as a lifeline for the future of the Welsh language.

This volume contains a collection of original studies in conversation analysis (C.A.) arranged and presented both to introduce the discipline to the newcomer and to reveal some of the expanding range of discoveries which conversation analysts are making in the course of their distinctive enquiries into the order and organisation of natural language. Though sociological in its orientation. C.A. and the papers here represented are of direct methodological and substantive interest to linguists, philosophers, discourse and speech analysts and social anthropologists. Indeed the strict adherence to the methodological principle that analysis can and must be shown to be grounded in data represents a challenge to all those disciplines which set out to use their materials as mere hand-maidens to support preconstructed models, theories and hypotheses. In this series of papers which includes previously unpublished works of the late Harvey Sacks and the last completed joint researches of Sacks, Jefferson and Schegloff ordinary talk is shown as consisting of a variety of previously unnoticed socially organised practices which conversationalists engage in to generate the organisation which talk has. The methods and the analytic mentality of conversation analysts are, and are here shown to be, designed to make conversationalist's methods, structure and modes of orientation available for empirical study. The search for order and organisation reveals it everywhere. Laughter is shown to be concertedly organised and negotiated in the finest detail. The machinery of delicate repair systems is revealed. Conversational completions are shown to be the product of elaborate negotiating machineries. Conversationalists are revealed as subtly orienting-to and invoking the visual contexts of their interaction within the framework of the turn-taking organisation of conversation. This volume also contains examples of conversation analytic work into the talk produced in organisational settings such as courts and Doctor/Patient interviews. Such analyses reveal the contribution that the discipline might make towards the exploration of the kind of social phenomena traditionally researched by sociologists, social psychologists and social anthropologists.