ABSTRACT
The basic proposition is straightforward. Multilingual classrooms have obvious potential for the development of English as an additional language. However, the history of trying to turn that potential into reality has been anything but straightforward. It is a history riddled with race, class, cultural and linguistic prejudice, a history of both official and unofficial obstruction to educational development – indeed a classic case of blindness on the part of education to its own provision of unequal opportunities. Consequently, theory, practice and principles for the countering of this situation have been initiated and developed from positions of opposition to the educational status quo. Progress has been made, but by no means enough of it for the present situation to be a happy one. Equal opportunities education strives, therefore, to be about the entitlement rhetoric promises, but does not deliver, i.e. about supposed equal rights of access to a meaningful curriculum, to cultural and linguistic respect, to high expectation of achievement and to greater equality of outcomes for all the social groups against which historic prejudices have worked.
