Initial results achieved by the Scol Multilingual Program on the Caribbean island of Aruba show how replacing a colonial understanding of immersion by a postcolonial one based on plurilingualism and translanguaging can result in higher skill levels in both home and colonial languages, and in areas such as critical thinking.
It is easy to forget that the great majority of foreign language immersion classrooms worldwide are to be found in the formal education systems of Africa, the Pacific, the Caribbean and Asia, where more than 40 per cent of the world’s primary and secondary school students are immersed daily in a colonial language that is not one of their home languages, and very often is not even one of their strong second languages. The less than optimal results of this colonial/neocolonial immersion approach have been well documented and the rights of children of all nations to home language education have been proclaimed, but communities across the globe who have taken the decision to remedy this situation face stiff opposition, not only because of the external ideological legacies of colonialism that continue to influence formal education policy and practice, but also because of the internalized ideological legacies of colonialism that continue to influence the attitudes of parents and teachers. This commonly results in an unproductive situation where home languages are pitted against colonial languages in a zero-sum game. In this paper, we report on some interesting attempts that have been made in the Scol Multilingual Program on the island of Aruba in the Dutch Caribbean to move beyond this exclusive binary toward inclusion, not only of Papiamento, the children’s home language, but also of Dutch, English and Spanish, the main colonial and immigrant languages used on the island. The very promising initial results of this program demonstrate how the replacement of a colonial/neocolonial monolithic conception of immersion by postcolonial understandings of immersion based on such concepts as plurilingualism and translanguaging can bring about more desirable outcomes in terms of students’ skills in both home and colonial languages, as well as in areas such as critical thinking and linguistic creativity.
