ABSTRACT
During the last decade, schools in the Madrid autonomous region have become multiethnic and therefore multilingual settings. The growing presence of children and teenagers from an immigrant background, in addition to other significant social changes in the education system, such as the extension of compulsory schooling to age 16 and improved access for socially excluded groups or minorities, have led to a situation where, as the legislation indicates today, ‘diversity is the rule’ in schools and colleges (Regional Plan of Compensatory Education, Community of Madrid, 2000). The research project on which this paper is based arose from a need to understand how this new linguistic diversity is managed, and its social and educational consequences in schools. After all, the study of how diversity is tackled is inseparable from the study of social inequality, and it is this interrelationship that we explore here. This issue, as we shall see, opens up ideological dilemmas for our societies. In order to overcome them, we need to revisit many notions including language skills and identity (along the lines set out by Stephen May in this volume).
