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One of the most striking moments in the life of Brazilian children speaking a minority language happens when they go to elementary school. There, the attitude towards the family language is completely indifferent, if not openly hostile, since the school sees its duty limited to alphabetising the child in the official language, which is Portuguese. This article reflects on practical strategies for teaching school children speaking immigrant languages, focussing on the different meaning of alphabetisation in minority language contexts and on the advantages of early bilingualism, ascertained by research in cognitive science (cf. Bialystok 2005). Immigrant contexts of this nature are being studied in the linguistic atlas project ALMA-H (Atlas Linguístico-Contatual das Minorias Alemãs na Bacia do Prata - Hunsrückisch). Based on data from this project and considering the Brazilian educational context the article proposes strategies that could help to improve the alphabetisation process of those groups by reconciling the dissociation that separates school contexts from family contexts in areas of collective bilingualism in Brazil.
For the most part, in linguistic policies, which mainly manifest themselves in educational measures, substandard varieties are at best ignored, if not actively suppressed. This often deprives pupils in immigrant situations and coming from a dialect background not only of their right to speaking their own language but also from the opportunity of aquiring the related standard, benefiting from early bilingual education. Instead, the national language is often used as the only language of instruction and is therefore likely to outdominate any other variety. This paper analyses two immigrant groups on the American continent which both represent diglossic communities in which High German as the High Variety has been lost or replaced by the national language while the related dialect is continuously used for in-group communication. Despite structural similarities in the sociolinguistic makeup of the two speech communities, there have been different approaches towards the teaching of standard German. The paper shows that language attitudes toward the substandard play a decisive role in these approaches. It is argued that instead of seeing the dialect as an obstacle for aquiring the standard variety it ought to be viewed as a suitable starting point to learning High German. Far from being an out-fashioned relic, dialects in immigrant communities should be conceived of as vantage ground for building multilingual societies which include the own vernacular as an element of identity, the related standard as a means of international communication and, of course, the national standard as an instrument of integration.