ANDTRANSLATION - Having it both - Kenji Hakuta ways

The problem of bilingualism is socially important for obvious reasons. Even if relatively stringent definitions of language ability were employed, probably a majority of the world’s population would be considered bilingual. Further, with increasing immigration, significant proportions of students in schools are coming from language backgrounds other than that of the majority culture. One study predicts that by the year 2000, one in three students in Western Europe will be of immigrant background, and in the United States there are currently a conservatively estimated 4.5 million students with language minority back-grounds. In addition to its social importance, -bilingualism raises fundamental questions about the relationship between language, mind and culture. These issues, such as the role of language in cognition or in the development of social identity, are not unique to bilinguals, but they become prominently displayed in bilingual individuals. Both Suzanne Romaine’s Bilingualkm and Josiane Hamers and Michel Blanc’s Bilinguality and Bilingualism are intended to be surveys of the subject and are very similar in scope. AS is now standard in the field, they distinguish between a bilingual individual and a bilingual community (which in the extreme case might consist of two groups of monolingual individuals). The discussion of the bilingual indiI . vidual draws urimarilv from the literature in in Canada may send their children to “immer~