ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to point out some theoretical objections to the view that a bilingual manifests dominance simply in one language or another, and to draw implications from this for assessment and teaching of bilingual children. Accordingly notions of mother-tongue teaching and educational programmes in language maintenance, enrichment and transfer have arisen, aimed at creating a less disadvantaged education for the child. Implicit in these stipulations and recommendations is the idea that there is a dominant language; that one of a bilingual's languages is mastered better than the other. Fishman long ago pointed out that in stable bilingual situations a community is unlikely to maintain two languages that perform exactly the same communicative functions. In the past sociolinguistic and strategic competence has not been emphasised as consequential in language acquisition. Olshtain and Blum-Kulka also focus on ways of assessing for communicative competence in second language acquisition.
