ABSTRACT
Several years ago I was working in a primary school in a provincial city - a northern city, a working town - that year without a class, a ‘remedial’ teacher, a teacher for ‘language development’. About half the children in the school spoke English as a second or third language, and under these cir cumstances I saw Amarjit, a 9-year-old Punjabi girl, every day, when she came to my room as part of a small group of children who received extra help with reading and writing. We thought vaguely that she had problems, difficulties with reading (staffing levels were still generous then; I doubt that anyone now could afford to think that she had a problem); she was in fact, in the process of becoming bilingual. Terminol ogy has moved on in the last few years, and in some cases is more helpful now than it was then. Four years ago Amarjit was, in the jargon, ‘a second language learner’, a label that confirmed her as being in possession of some irritating and elusive inadequacy. Born here, speaking the local dialect, she was a child who didn’t need to be taught to speak English, but who failed in some mysterious way to write English adequate ly, to measure up to the norm on reading tests, to demonstrate the requisite quality of imagination and the proper degree of promise.
