Chapters 2 and 3

Chapter 2 is distinguishing the Inner Circle, Outer Circle and Expanding Circle.  The inner circle rejects language minority students and view language diversity as a problem in society.  Language minority's are supposed to learn English without development of their first language.  The Outer Circle still encourages English development, but the language minority students have just as much access to English education as the native language students.  In this way there is more acceptance of the language minority.  The Expanding Circle countries have teachers that experience problems motivating learners of English and may not have perfect proficiency in their English. 

Chapter 3 examines the role of diglossia of multilingual societies.  It gives a thorough investigation of the role of English in South Africa and India.  Both of these countries have many mother tongues with in their population, multiple official languages in their government, governmental support of multilingual people, English taught in school, English used in certain contexts and the key to a better career.  The government has such a huge role in the social formation of a country.  What the political leaders enforce, the schools respond, and the people respond.  One thing that I found interesting is the support of the government and the lack of reality.  Just like No Child Left Behind, the governmental policy (on multilingualism) looks good on paper, but does not reflect the reality of the situation.  English has a stigma in these countries which separates the classes even further.  The social classes show that those that speak English are apart of an elite class.  It is required for students to speak English when entering college and those that apart of a low social class are not given proper education and cannot speak English and cannot go to college keeping them in the lower class.  This brings me to my big question... Is a country able to be multilingual and still have equal value for each language?

I liked how the chapter concentrated on bilingual education and focused in support of bilingual education. It also mentions proposition 227 which is a significant era that shows the United States' view on bilingual education.  The diglossia of language seems to be non-existent for both the United States and Britain.  Governments give little support to the teaching of bilingual education.  Nor do they support native English speakers learning a second language.  How would our society change if we had multiple official languages?