This article presents an ethnographic study of how bilingual teachers and children use their home language, TexMex, to mediate academic content and standard languages. From the premise that TESOL educators can benefit from a fuller understanding of students' linguistic repertoires, the study describes language practices in a second-grade classroom in a transitional bilingual education program in a wellestablished Mexican American community in San Antonio, Texas. The data suggest that the participants move fluidly between not just Spanish and English, but also the standard and vernacular varieties, a movement that is called translanguaging (O. García, 2009). Translanguaging through TexMex enables the teacher and students to create discursive spaces that allow them to engage with the social meanings in school from their position as bilingual Latinos. The teacher's adoption of a flexible bilingual pedagogy (Creese & Blackledge, 2010) allows for translanguaging in the classroom not only as a way of making sense of content and learning language, but also as a legitimized means of performing desired identities.
This article discusses the idea of linguistic landscape and describes a small-scale research project undertaken in a local EFL community in Mexico using public signs to analyse the social meanings of English. The author presents a framework that distinguishes between intercultural and intracultural uses, as well as iconic and innovative uses of English on signs. He also identifies six social meanings represented on the signs and uses photographs to illustrate each meaning. He argues that the project is useful both for thinking about the innovative ways people use the language in local contexts and as a template for a classroom-based project that teachers can implement that engages EFL students in investigating and talking about social language use. The conclusion presents an approach for using the linguistic landscape as a pedagogical resource in the EFL classroom which casts the students as language investigators and offers ideas for extension activities that connect the language classroom to the streets of the learners' community.
This study examines the biliteracy development of a group of bilingual Latino third graders in an elementary school in the south-west USA. It focuses on the role of language in children’s reading comprehension of narrative texts in Spanish and English in a school context. The authors frame their analysis within the ‘Continua of Biliteracy’ model (Hornberger, 1989, 2003), highlighting how the youngsters drew on their linguistic resources to negotiate the contexts and contents of biliteracy. Data come from the students’ 24 retellings of story books, alternating between Spanish and English. The data were analyzed using story grammar and sociolinguistic analysis. The findings of the study show how, for young bilingual and bicultural students, their languages themselves exist on a continuum.That is, in developing their biliteracy, these children navigate linguistic borderlands through their use of Spanglish, reflecting their sociolinguistic and sociocultural realities where there are not necessarily strong distinctions between Spanish and English.
As global English expands, developing countries feel the pressure that, in order to remain globally competitive, they must increase the number of people with English proficiency. In response, many countries have significantly expanded English instruction in public schools by implementing primary English language teaching (PELT) programs. This is particularly true in countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America, where national Ministries of Education have taken a "more & earlier" approach, integrating English into the public primary curriculum. Children start learning English younger and study the language more during their basic education. The author argues that this language education policy shift toward expanding English in the public education curricula in developing countries is best understood as a shift from past models of elite English bilingualism to policies intended to support the macroacquisition, or general proficiency in English. The rationale for this policy change is framed in terms of the "modernization" and "internationalization" of a country's public education system, and hence should be understood as part of the response to align education curricula and programs with neoliberal policies. The author examines Mexico's recent national English program for public primary schools as a case study in the implementation of neoliberal language policy. Participation in global markets increasingly happens in and through English. As global English expands, developing countries feel the pressure that, in order to become globally competitive, they must increase the number of their citizens who are proficient in English. At the individual level, families equate their children learning English with better job prospects in the future. In response, many countries have significantly expanded English instruction in public schools (Enever & Moon, 2010). This is particularly true in countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America, where national Ministries of Education have taken a "more & earlier" approach (Hamid, 2010), integrating English into the primary school curriculum. The simple logic of these programs is that the earlier children start learning English and the more years they study English, the greater their L2 gains will be. These educational programs, then, are directly connected to expanding economic 41 countries and argue that the status and role of English in Mexico is both enhanced and complicated by the geographical proximity and historical and current cultural ties with the United States, as well as the importance of Spanish as a regional and global language. I make the case that the Mexican program represents a policy shift from past models of elite English bilingualism to policies intended to support macroacquisition, or general proficiency in English. Next, I locate Mexico's adoption of its new public school program as part of a global move towards primary English language teaching (PELT). The PELT phenomenon is clearly reflected in the language education policies of developing countries-seen as "...
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