Acquisition planning Immigrants to Israel benefit from numerous organized efforts to help them learn Hebrew. ‘Absorption centers,” where immigrants live while sorting out their employment and housing arrangements, offer subsidized, on-site, intensive, six-month Hebrew classes. Other classes, intensive and non- intensive, are offered by municipalities for nominal fees. Universities offer special language courses for foreign students and for immigrant faculty and their spouses. When immigrant children go to school, they are offered classes in Hebrew as a second language, if there are enough children to form a class. Otherwise, children may be pulled out of their classes for a few hours of individual instruction per week. A weekly newspaper is published in simplified Hebrew, the news is broadcast daily in simplified (and slower) Hebrew, and Hebrew literature is translated into simplified Hebrew. A television series in simplified Hebrew, produced in the 1970s, is rebroadcast from time to time. All of these programs and devices exem- plify acquisition planning, which refers to organized efforts to promote the learning of a language. Other examples of acquisition planning abound: To improve the Korean-language skills of Korean-Americans, the University of California at Los Angeles began, in 1987, a program whereby its Korean-American students could travel to Seoul National University for ten weeks of Korean-language study. To facilitate the acquisition of Russian by non-Russian nationalities in the Soviet Union, Soviet language planners have imposed the Cyrillic script on most of the Soviet minority languages and use Russian models to moder- nize the vocabularies of these languages. To promote the study of English, the British Council maintains English- language libraries abroad and sends experts to organize workshops and to advise local personnel about methods of teaching. The Alliance francaise and the Goethe Institute engage in comparable activities for the promotion of French and German respectively. 157158 Language planning and social change To halt the emigration of population from the Gaeltacht, the last remnant of native speakers of Irish for whom Irish is the chief language of everyday life, the Irish government set up state agencies for the economic develop- ment of the area. To create urban conditions where new speakers of Irish might transmit their Irish to their children, the government has proposed two new city projects in Dublin which would bring Irish speakers into regular contact with each other and thus promote social support for the language outside the home (Dorian 1987). ‘When China recovered Taiwan in 1945, Japanese, which had been the sole language of instruction and the dominant language for fifty years, was banned in all mass media. The National-Language policy, the pro- motion of Mandarin as the national language, begun on the Mainland in the 1920s and 1930s, was introduced to Taiwan. As Berg (1985) points out, the schools were a natural medium for this promotion, inasmuch as the Japanese had left a national network of schools. Local Chinese dialects (Minnan and Hakka) were temporarily permitted for oral commu- nication in the schools. Traditional Chinese reading material was reintro- duced and the National-Language reading pronunciation was soon required, although many teachers were unable to implement this rule. Mandarin speakers were imported from the Mainland to help teach via the National Language and to train other teachers to use Mandarin. Gra- dually the schools have produced more people literate in Mandarin and able to speak at least some Mandarin (Berg 1985). Among the devices employed to promote knowledge of Mandarin have been the early use of radio and newspapers to explain the meaning and purpose of the National- Language policy, a Demonstration Broadcasting Program (1946-1959) which promoted the National-Language pronunciation, and the publica- tion of newspapers in Mandarin printed in transcribed characters (Kwock- Ping Tse 1986). The Rohunga reo, or “language nests,”” set up in the early 1980s to revita- lize Maori, provide a final example. In response to a progressive decline in the number of Maori speakers in New Zealand, Maori leaders suggested the establishment of Maori-medium pre-schools, in which older Maoris would serve as caretakers. These caretakers, in fact, would be the gene- ration of the children’s grandparents, inasmuch as few of the children’s parents could still speak Maori. The new pre-schools received some support from the Department of Maori Affairs, but those local communities who wanted to organize and implement the program had to do most of the work themselves. The number of centers has advanced exponentially: four in 1982, 280 in 1984, and nearly 500 in 1987. “The effect of the kohunga reo cannot be exaggerated, when [in 1981] a bare handful of children came to primary school with any knowledge of the Maori lan- guage, now each year between two and three thousand children enter begin-Acquisition planning 159 ners’ classes having been exposed to daily use of the Maori language and many of them are fluent bilinguals” (Spolsky 1987). The growing number of children who can speak Maori has encouraged parents, pleased that the children are learning their ancestors’ language, to pressure primary schools to establish bilingual programs in English and Maori. When school principals are willing, space is available, and school boards are supportive or at least compliant, such programs have begun, in spite of difficulty in finding staff willing and able to teach via Maori and in spite of lack of curriculum materials, which staff have had to create themselves (Spolsky 1987) Such examples of acquisition planning can be distinguished from one another on at least two bases: (1) the overt language planning goal and (2) the method employed to attain the goal. With respect to overt goals, we can distinguish at least three: (a) acquisition of the language as a second or foreign language, as in the acquisition of Amharic by non-Amharas in Ethiopia, French by Anglophones in Montreal, spoken Mandarin by Taiwanese; (b) reacquisition of the language by populations for whom it was once either a vernacular - as in the renativization of Hebrew, the attempts to renativize Irish, and the revitalization of Maori - or a language of specialized function, as in the return of written Chinese to Taiwan; and (c) language maintenance, as in the efforts to prevent the further erosion of Irish in the Gaeltacht. It might be said that this last objective represents not language acquisition at all. I include it, however, because maintenance of a language implies its acquisition by the next generation. When a language declines, smaller and smaller percentages of ensuing generations acquire the language. Prevention of decline requires mainten- ance of acquisition. With respect to the means employed to attain acquisition goals, we may distinguish three types: those designed primarily to create or to improve the opportunity to learn, those designed primarily to create or to improve the incentive to learn, and those designed to create or improve both oppor- tunity and incentive simultaneously. Methods which focus upon the opportunity to learn can in turn be divided into direct and indirect methods. The former include classroom instruc- tion, the provision of materials for self-instruction in the target language, and the production of literature, newspapers, and radio and television programs in simplified versions of the target language. Indirect methods include efforts to shape the learners’ mother tongue so that it will be more similar to the target language, which will then presumably be easier to learn. Soviet planning of non-Russian minority languages provides an example, Examples of methods which focus upon the incentive to learn are the inclusion of English as a compulsory subject in the Israeli secondary-school