Teaching for Transfer: Challenging the Two Solitudes Assumption in Bilingual Education
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TEACHING FOR TRANSFER: CHALLENGING THE TWO SOLITUDES ASSUMPTION IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION
Two related assumptions regarding medium of instruction dominate second language teaching and bilingual education programs. Both of these assumptions reflect what Howatt (1984) terms “the monolingual principle.” In the case of second and foreign language teaching it is assumed that instruction should be carried out, as far as possible, exclusively in the target language without recourse to students’ first language (L1). In the case of bilingual and second language immersion programs, it has become axiomatic that the two languages should be kept rigidly separate. In this paper, I discuss the research and theoretical literature relevant to this “two solitudes” assumption and argue that it has minimal research basis. When we free ourselves from exclusive reliance on monolingual instructional approaches, a wide variety of opportunities arise for teaching bilingual students by means of bilingual instructional strategies that acknowledge the reality of, and strongly promote, cross-language transfer. Some of these instructional strategies involve encouraging students to use translation as a tool for promoting transfer across languages. The use of bilingual in addition to monolingual (target language) dictionaries is also seen as a legitimate and useful tool within a bilingual pedagogical orientation that focuses on teaching for two-way transfer across languages. Advocacy of translation as a pedagogical tool is unusual in today’s era of communicative language teaching and it is important to emphasize at the outset that I am not suggesting a return to the stultifying world of grammar-translation instruction where the focus was on teaching grammar in isolation from communication and using translation as an end in itself. Rather the argument is that translation has a role to play within a broadly defined communicative approach as a means of enabling students to create multimedia texts that communicate in powerful and authentic ways with multiple audiences in both L1 and L2. The roots of the two solitudes assumption lie in the direct method that became popular in the context of second and foreign language teaching more than 100 years ago and has continued to exert a strong influence on various language-teaching approaches since that time J. Cummins and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 5: Bilingual Education, 65–75. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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JIM CUMMINS
(Cook, 2001; Howatt, 1984; Yu, 2001). In the next section, I sketch the evolution of the direct method and its mutation into the two solitudes assumption in the context of bilingual/immersion education. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Yu (2001) points out that the direct method developed in opposition to the grammar-translation method during the late 1880s, mainly in France and Germany. The essence of this approach is that “[t]he direct method imitated the way that children learn their first language, emphas
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