Riordan Manufacturing was founded in 1991 by Michael Riordan with an initial focus on the licensing of existing patents, research and development. Today they are looked at as a leader in the plastic injection field. They have received international acclaim in for their works. As a Fortune 1000 enterprise they offer state of the art plastic design through its facilities. They currently are head quartered in San Jose with additional plants in Albany, Pontiac and Hangzhou. (Apollo, 2006)
To what extent is English-medium education the solution or the problem in settings where English is not the dominant language of the pupils’ homes or local communities?
Unfortunately, this is not a question I am going to be able to give one clear, definitive answer to as I believe that English-medium education can be both a problem, and a solution in situations where English is not the dominant language. On the one hand we have cases such as the one that can be seen in the state of Karnataka in India, where English-medium education has been replaced by one of the local languages, Kannada, a sensible decision many would say, but not when you consider that most of the urban areas in the State are multilingual, with people whose mother-tongues are Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi, Gujarati, Sindhi, Bengali, and many more (Resource and Reference Materials, p.81), so here, it could be argued, that one combining language, such as English, should be used that would be of benefit to all as a lingua franca. Then on the other hand you have Kathleen Heugh’s argument that without a full understanding of their mother-tongue children will struggle to fully understand what they are being taught, and that English-medium education should not begin until the children have received at least 6-8 years of mother-tongue education to avoid any such problems of comprehension (Learning English, pp.181-88)
