Language Socialization and CLIL Teachers' Agency in Castilla-La Mancha Bilingual Programs: Appropriations and Transformations 1 (original) (raw)
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Foro de Educación, 2019
Language socialization research in bilingual and multilingual settings, particularly across EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language) contexts, has addressed the processes by which novices are «apprenticed» or mentored into the linguistic and nonlinguistic ideologies, values, practices, and stances (affective, epistemic, and other) of sociocultural groups to ultimately become «competent members» of these learning communities. However, one of the unexplored bilingual education contexts from a language socialization perspective refers to «Content and Language Integrated Learning» or CLIL, defined as «inclusive of a wide range of educational practices provided that these practices are conducted through the medium of an additional language and both language and the subject have a joint role». Taking these premises as a point of departure, this article discusses the language socialization processes CLIL teachers undergo to become competent members of the bilingual school communities (BSC) that have proliferated extensively in Castilla-La Mancha (CLM), Spain, in the last decade. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in four different bilingual state-funded and state-funded private schools in this region, the article analyzes the case of San Marcos' teachers' narratives of becoming and doing CLIL as «metaagentive» discursive sites that display the ideologies and practices of professional personhood at stake in CLIL programs. The article further advances the latest ethnographic CLIL agenda interested in revealing the social processes involved in the organization of exclusionary practices in the era of the «bilingual» craze and pressure across different Spanish autonomous communities.
This article analyzes how neoliberalism as ideology and practice permeates CLIL-type bilingual education teachers' narratives collected as part of the sociolinguistic ethnography conducted in four Spanish-English bilingual schools in La Mancha City (pseudonym). The rapid implementation of Spanish-English bilingual programs in Castilla-La Mancha schools in the last decade (e.g. «MEC/British» programs; «Linguistic Programs» regulated by the regional «Plan of Plurilingualism», last amended in 2018; «Bilingual Programs» in semi-private schools) invites to reflect on how neoliberalism plays a role in the commodification of English language teaching and learning in these programs. Particularly, the article discusses how teachers participating in these programs position themselves towards their personal experiences teaching CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) subjects in these bilingual programs. The analysis shows how these teachers are appropriating and resisting in some cases bilingualism as a neoliberal ideology and practice that reconfigures their professional identities as self-governing free subjects who must know English at all costs to compete in the highly commodified global market of English.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2019
This article focuses on the 'native speaker effects ' (Doerr, N. M., ed. 2009. The Native Speaker Concept: Ethnographic Investigations of Native Speaker Effects. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) pertaining to the construction of eliteness in Spanish-English CLIL-type bilingual programmes in the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). We focus our attention on St. Teo's school, one of the target schools of the sociolinguistic ethnography carried out in state-run and state-run private schools in La Mancha City (LMC) -2015/2018. Data includes long-term participant observation, audiotaping of classroom interactions in the CLIL subjects, semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders, and institutional documents of the language-in-education policies implemented in the region of Castilla-La Mancha. We discuss how St. Teo's has adapted competitively to local bilingual education policies by relying on native speakers of English as guarantors of educational elitism, distinctiveness and linguistic prestige in the highly commodified market of English. The analysis brings to the fore how the inclusion of English native teachers in St. Teo's bilingual programme has had an immediate effect on the current English-medium teaching practices, resulting in asymmetrical partnerships between content and native English teachers and causing tensions and dilemmas among teachers participating in the bilingual programme.
Language and Education, 2020
English language education in the region of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) has undergone significant change in the last decade with the rapid implementation of different types of CLIL-based Spanish-English bilingual programs. This situation places English linguistic competence at the center of controversy given the need for certified bilingual teachers participating in CLIL-type bilingual programs, who must comply with the minimum B2 level of English and are expected to engage in the successful teaching of content subjects. Within this context, this paper draws from a larger multi-sited linguistic ethnography and analyzes the organization of bilingual classroom interactions in a semi-private school that claims to implement a distinct language program built around teaching partnerships between 'native' language assistants (NLAs) and content teachers (CTs). We draw from critical research on communicative competence and changing definitions of workers in late capitalism to examine how linguistic and professional hierarchies are reconstructed within this bilingual classroom interactional order.
This article analyzes how multilingual education in the Madrid region has been addressed through the medium of Spanish/English content and language integrated learning (CLIL) bilingual programs, widely implemented in public schools of this region in the last decade. By adopting a critical interpretive perspective (Tollefson in Language policies in education: critical issues. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, 2002) to the understanding of bilingual education in the Madrid region, the article explores the links between current CLIL classroom practices, local and European language education policies and wider social and ideological processes of globalization and neoliberalism in late modernity. Particularly, the article analyzes the commodification of CLIL programs by examining how local values and beliefs about bilingualism and the prestige of English as Europe's lingua franca intersect with situated notions of who counts as a bilingual student in the CLIL classroom and the emergent categorization of elistism assigned to bilingual programs in Madrid. Drawing on data collected as part of the team critical sociolinguistic ethnography conducted at 'Villababel High', the article discusses specifically language choice in the CLIL classroom as a key practice to understand the tensions involved in bilingual education policy in late modernity.
LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE: DECONSTRUCTING BOUNDARIES IN INTERCULTURAL BILINGUAL EDUCATION
Trabalhos em Linguistica Aplicada, 57-3: 1-26, 2018
Although Peru's Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) program has been attempting to pursue new directions, it still carries many ideologies and practices that have defined it since it started half a century ago. In this article, I discuss the way some of these ideologies and practices related to language are reproduced in a preservice teacher training program in one of the capital city's private universities, which implements a national policy of social inclusion for Quechua-speaking youth from vulnerable contexts. On the basis of diverse dichotomies (L1/L2, Spanish use/Quechua use, Spanish literacy practices/Quechua literacy practices, Quechua speaker/Spanish speaker), the program produces two types of hierarchized subjectivities: one related to the subject educated in Quechua and another related to the subject educated in Spanish, both coming from a conception of languages as discrete codes that go together with fixed ethnolinguistic groups and bounded cultural practices (GARCÍA et al., 2017). In the context of new sociocultural dynamics and bilingualisms, young students in the program subvert these divisions and begin to trace new paths for IBE and Quechua in Perú. RESUMO Apesar do programa de Educação Intercultural Bilíngue (EIB) do Peru estar tentando buscar novas direções, ele ainda carrega no seu bojo muitas das ideologias e práticas que o vem definindo desde que iniciou há meio século. Neste artigo, discuto o modo como algumas dessas ideologias e práticas relativas a línguas são reproduzidas em um programa de treinamento pré-serviço de professores em uma das universidades particulares da capital do país, a qual implementa uma política nacional de inclusão social para jovens falantes de quéchua oriundos de contextos vulneráveis. Tendo por base dicotomias diversas (L1/L2, uso do espanhol/uso do quéchua, práticas de letramento em espanhol/práticas de letramento em quéchua, falante de quéchua/falante de espanhol), o programa produz dois tipos de subjetividades hierarquizadas: uma relativa ao sujeito educado em quéchua e uma outra relativa ao sujeito educado em espanhol, ambas derivadas da noção de línguas como códigos discretos e vinculadas a determinados grupos etnolinguísticos e a práticas culturais bem
Our world is becoming more and more complex, constantly imposing new societal, cultural and professional demands on the individual, such as the increased need for plurilinguistic competences. This situation has prompted the systematic search for new teaching methods that encourage the learning of foreign languages in the school context. One of these approaches is CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) instruction. In Spain, CLIL is increasingly becoming a widespread approach in order to foster foreign language learning in both primary and secondary education. The major aim of this paper is to discuss the implementation of CLIL methodology in three Spanish monolingual communities (Extremadura, Madrid, and La Rioja) so as to suggest future actions to improve its development. In doing so, it will look into the similar and distinctive traits of CLIL implementation initiatives in these communities as well as analysing the various teacher training programmes designed to prepare teachers for bilingual education and what CLIL research has concluded in the Extremadura, Madrid and La Rioja area to date.
In monolingual areas such as the southern Spanish Autonomous Community of Andalusia, the progressive introduction of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programmes in a wide range of primary and secondary schools has probably produced the biggest turning point in Spain’s modern educational history. CLIL is initially focused on enhancing learners’ language competences. However, the reflection on otherness considered to be implicitly embodied in CLIL education is thought to contribute to learners’ development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC). This article looks into the relationship between CLIL and ICC by presenting a case study of Andalusian CLIL primary and secondary schools. The results show that there is some evidence that CLIL constitutes a framework for the implementation of interculturally-oriented methodological approaches and that it has the potential to contribute to the enhancement of learners’ intercultural communicative competence.
The politics of plurilingualism: Immersion, translanguaging, and school autonomy in Catalonia
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This paper aims to investigate the politics of plurilingualism in education and, more concretely, the various interests at play behind the introduction of innovations by education authorities in Catalonia, Spain. To do this, the paper critically examines the linguistic model of language in education and the public debate that its introduction generated, focusing on three themes: immersion, translanguaging, and school autonomy. The model, which acknowledges cultural diversity and values plurilingualism, would appear to embrace developments in the field of multi/plurilingual research, although there have been disparate interpretations of the policy. But this case also represents the “politics of innovation”, that is, the invocation of international educational trends for political purposes. The paper (a) argues that sociolinguistic scholars should seriously scrutinise how research may become a sociopolitical tool external to sociolinguistics, and (b) claims that sociolinguists should be more attentive to how we lend our own professional concepts to political agendas.
Language Education and Institutional Change in a Madrid Multilingual School
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This article examines the institutional transformations of language-in-education programmes in Madrid, linked to wider socio-economic processes of change. Drawing on a research team’s ethnographic revisit, we explore how wider processes are impacting everyday discursive practices in the Bridging Class (BC) programme, first implemented in 2003 to teach Spanish to the children of migrant workers in state schools. We focus on the co-existence of this programme with the recently implemented Bilingual Schools Programme (BSP), aimed to equip students from working-class areas to compete in global markets. Based on the analysis of interviews and classroom interactions with BC students at one secondary school, in connection with the wider socio-historical processes underlying language-in-education policies, this study reveals a process of discrediting of the BC that contributed to a local hierarchization of programmes (and its participants). Further implications are discussed regarding how individuals collaborated with each other under these institutional conditions.