Introduction

In bilingual education, teaching through two languages is a permanent or semi-permanent feature in the classroom. Although such duality can arise for non-instrumental reasons, as part of a general educational philosophy – one designed, for instance, for those destined to become ‘élite’ bilinguals – a more common scenario involves need-driven programs of bilingual education. It may be considered pedagogically important, for example, to provide at least early schooling through the medium of children’s first language (see also below). As well, if pupils’ maternal languages are of minority status, then the desire to sustain and encourage those varieties, while also providing access to a ‘larger’ medium, may also suggest bilingual education. The idea here is usually that the basic educational foundations can be most firmly laid when the children’s ethnocultural identity is not jeopardized.

Bilingual education has a very long history indeed, but it is in the relatively well-understood circumstances of Greek-Latin bilingualism (or diglossia) that we see the clearest foreshadowing of circumstances that have remained pertinent ever since. Lewis (1977) provided a brief survey, up to the time of the Renaissance, which remains useful. A more recent treatment is that of Adams et al. (2002). Focusing on the Roman age, Adams (2003) has produced a magisterial, if technically rather specialized, account. (The term diglossia, incidentally, is used to describe a relatively enduring relationship between two languages or dialects – traditionally, ‘high’ and ‘low’ variants. Etymologically, of course, it is simply the Greek for ‘bilingualism’.) Cicero, Quintilian and other Roman luminaries preferred Greek to Latin as the medium of schooling, pedagogy was generally modeled on Greek curricula, and formal instruction in Greek often preceded that in Latin. Since children from patrician homes were often cared for by Greek servants and tutors, they were frequently bilingual before first going to school, anyway. Still, concerns were sometimes expressed about children speaking Latin with Greek intonation and – a precedent for more contemporary worries – about the possibility of somehow over-burdening a child’s time and ‘limited’ cognitive capacity.