Title
"It will emerge if they grow fond of it": Translanguaging and power in Quechua teaching
Date Issued
01 December 2015
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Publisher(s)
Elsevier Ltd
Abstract
This article addresses Quechua instruction to emergent bilinguals in urban schools, as part of the implementation of a language policy promoting Quechua in the Peruvian Andes. In the light of two other teachers who work in similar scenarios and the language ideologies of Quechua experts leading the language policy, this article analyzes a focal teacher who constructs alternative ideologies and subjectivities that contribute to transform the power relationships typically enacted in these racially segregated urban schools. Through translanguaging strategies for involving her diverse audience (Creese & Blackledge, 2010; García, 2009) and a critical language awareness approach to make the invisible visible and the inaudible audible (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004), this teacher constructs a community of legitimate Quechua speakers, which subverts the dominant representation of the bilingual speaker as the "perfectly" coordinated bilingual and the invisibilization of emergent bilinguals in the official language policy. Like other studies that conceptualize teachers as policy makers (Menken & García, 2010), the present study shows that teachers negotiate with official language policies and can ultimately contest them in practice. However, in the case under study, this constitutes a process where the teacher initially reproduces ambiguous and contradictory discourses before reaching more critical positionings.
Start page
16
End page
26
Volume
32
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Idiomas específicos Lingüística
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84947488598
Source
Linguistics and Education
ISSN of the container
08985898
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus