ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, we advocated the use of literacy bridges for language minority children, as our primary concern was to find the best way of building upon the children’s actual out-of-school resources in order to help them achieve educational success. But of course there are other, equally legitimate concerns, such as a particular community’s concern that children learn the community language (their ‘mother tongue’) even if they may not speak it at all and may have to learn it almost as a ‘foreign’ language. These concerns are often conflated or confused by mother tongue education advocates, and hence it is important to keep them conceptually distinct. The latter concern is frequently found in communities that have suffered from a long history of oppression, such as Native American communities, and for whom heritage language education is therefore extremely important.
