Introduction

Once a privilege, access to education is now a right; indeed, most children are required to go to school until a determined age. Classrooms must often cater, then, for children from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, a circumstance that can give rise to educational pressures of various kinds. There are many different ways in which schools, and educational bureaucracies in general, can respond to issues raised by the heterogeneity of populations, but perhaps it is not unfair to see these as falling into two (very) broad categories. The first involves pupils adapting to the ideas and methods of the school; the second involves the school demonstrating, to a greater or lesser degree, a willingness to adapt itself to the pupils. The further back in time one goes, the more likely it is that one will encounter examples within the first of these categories. Conversely, present-day education in many parts of the world is likely to exhibit some adaptive tendencies – or, at least, it is now considered reasonable to discuss possibilities in this connection. In terms of responding to what is essentially a discontinuity between the milieus of home and school, both the maintenance of a relatively unaltered 'core' curriculum within a traditional milieu, and a policy of accommodation, can be understood to have positive and negative aspects.

The focus of this book is largely upon responses to children's varied language abilities, but these are often intertwined with considerations of message as well as medium. In terms of what is to be taught, for example, it is now common to read about the provision of group-specific information – history, culture, linguistic heritage, religion and so on – particularly where there are sufficient concentrations of indigenous or immigrant minority-group children. Questions of the degree to which content should be modified for specific student populations or, indeed, of the appropriateness of the exercise at all have become very heated in some settings.