Anne-Marie de Mejía – författare

This book offers a new perspective for research in the field of bilingual education by proposing an integrated approach to the study of bilingualism in minority and majority settings. Programmes for indigenous groups, for national minorities and for migrants are analysed together with programmes aimed at dominant language groups, by well-known scholars from eight different countries in Europe and the Americas. Each contribution seeks to go beyond the traditional dichotomy between policy, practice and research into bilingual education programmes for majority language speakers, and modalities offered for minority language speakers. Thus, the book argues for the construction of a shared discourse for research into bilingualism and bilingual education and for the adoption of an ecological perspective on language education.

This book describes a particular type of educational provision referred to as ‘elite’ or ‘prestigious’ bilingual education, which caters mainly for upwardly mobile, highly educated, higher socio-economic status learners of two or more internationally useful languages. The development of different types of elite bilingual or multilingual educational provision is discussed and an argument is made for the need to study bilingual education in majority as well as in minority contexts.

The development of bilingual education in South America can be traced back to the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese colonisers in the 15th and 16th centuries, when Catholic missionaries began their evangelisation of the indigenous peoples using local vernaculars, as well as Latin, Spanish and Portuguese. Traditionally, debate on bilingual education has been conducted in two separate arenas: majority language contexts involving international languages, such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and minority community contexts aimed at maintaining native Amerindian languages as well as the different Sign Languages of the South American Deaf communities.

This book presents an integrated vision of bilingual education in six South American nations: three Andean countries, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, and three ‘Southern Cone’ countries, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. It includes work carried out in minority as well as majority language contexts, referring to developments in the fields of indigenous, Deaf, and international bilingual and multilingual provision.