ABSTRACT
Home language instruction at Dutch primary schools has a unique history of implementation (see Extra & Verhoeven, 1993). For large groups of pupils, home languages were introduced as a subject and a medium of instruction in 1974 without teacher guidance and inspection, even without a legal base. The developments in this domain in the early 1970s should be evaluated against the background of a policy perspective on ethnic-minority children in terms of socioeconomic and second language “deficits” rather than ethnocultural differences. At that time, a struggle against deficits of low socioeconomic status (SES) children was announced for all primary schools in the Netherlands by the Ministry of Education. As a consequence, schools with many low SES children were allocated additional teaching staff. As the influx of ethnic-minority children from low SES families at Dutch schools strongly increased during the 1970s and 1980s, policy regarding minorities became implicitly more equated with a struggle against deficits, at the cost of ethnocultural differences. In newer proposals, the SES criterion was disregarded and education in nonindigenous living languages was allowed for all children who make use of another language at home, apart from or instead of Dutch, in contact with at least one of the parents. In the current policy conception, home-language instruction is primarily aimed at bridging the gap between home and school environment, and at promoting bilingual and biliteracy development and school success.
