In this paper, the bilingualism of local communities and the way that a group of high school teachers discuss and understand bilingualism and biliteracy of two kinds of bilingual youth are examined from a place-based, place-conscious perspective. The high school teachers want to create a new dual language program for local students from Laredo and students from across the Rio Grande River, Nuevo Laredo. The paper shows how the teachers’ language orientations and ideologies inform the ways they view the language capabilities differently for each group of students, favoring academic Spanish and lamenting the language deficits of local Laredo bilingual youth. The paper ends with a recommendation for ways to trouble language orientations and ideologies with an eye toward gaining a deeper, more place-conscious understanding of youth bilingualism and how schools and teachers bear responsible for improving conditions for expanding bilingualism of local youth.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.