Volume: 20  Number: 1  Page: 36–51  doi:10.2167/lcc325.0

Equality and Inequality of Opportunity in Education: Chinese Emergent Bilingual Children in the English Mainstream Classroom

Yangguang Chen Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK and Fujian Teachers University, China

In Britain, since the 1980s, the term ‘equality of opportunity’ has been a major theme at the heart of the government's agenda. Centralisation via the National Curriculum documents has strengthened the idea of ‘education for all’. In terms of many linguistic minority children, mainstreaming and the English as an Additional Language (EAL) provision subsumed within a conceptualisation of mainstream English has been claimed to be the best way to ensure equal opportunity for children with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds since the 1990s. This study, therefore, is set within the political context outlined above, investigating how beneficial it is for emergent bilingual children to be plunged into English mainstream classrooms during their first days in school, or in other words, what equal opportunity really means for them. Participants in the study include three 8–11-year-old children of two newly arrived families; the parents and the school teachers are also involved. A variety of ethnographic methods are used to highlight what it means to be a newcomer in the English mainstream classroom, and through which the problematic nature of inclusion in the mainstream class is illustrated. It is argued that bilingualism is potentially an advantage to these children, but only if they are given substantial language support.

Keywords: inclusion, language, newcomers, mainstream, policy, support

© 2007 Yangguang Chen

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