ABSTRACT
The development of language support for bilingual and multilingual children has followed a pattern broadly similar to the development of support for special educational needs. Until the 1980s, the predominant pattern was for children deemed to be in need of additional support in learning English to receive that support through withdrawal from mainstream teaching for specialist help in small groups, or through attendance at a language centre. Initially, this was seen as a form of positive discrimination: a vital and necessary resource to address a specific need affecting a small minority of children. Gradually, however, there was a groundswell of opinion amongst language teachers that the mainstream classroom might provide richer, more productive contexts for learning language by using language for the purposes of other learning.
