"English Communicative Competence for All"? Language Ideologies and Social Categorization in Castilla–La Mancha Bilingual Schools' Teaching Partnerships

• In Event: Communicative Competence: Looking Within and Across Public Schooling Contexts to Examine Language and Power

Abstract

English language education in the region of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain has undergone significant changes in the last decade with the rapid implementation of different types of Spanish-English bilingual programs (e.g. ‘MEC/British’; ‘Linguistic Programs’ regulated by the regional ‘Plan of Plurilingualism’, amended in 2014), which are organized according to the availability of human and material resources, namely the number of teachers who can accredit at least a B2 level of English as stated by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and who are willing to teach their content subjects in English.

This situation places English linguistic competence at the center of controversy given that bilingual teachers and students’ communicative skills must be assessed as legitimate in order to belong to the different types of bilingual programs. In addition, English communicative competence also becomes central to define and classify schools in this region as eligible for developing and implementing Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) programs.

Drawing on data collected in the ongoing sociolinguistic ethnography conducted at four public and semi-private schools in La Mancha City, which includes long-term participant observation, audiotaping of classroom interactions in content subjects taught in English, semi-structured interviews and institutional documents of language-in-education policies in this region, this paper analyzes the ideological dimensions of English communicative competence against the backdrop of neoliberal language policies in this region.

Following recent critical research on communicative competence (Kataoka, Ikeda & Besnier, 2013; Jaffe, 2013; Makihara, 2013), this paper analyzes the construction of communicative competence that circulates among stakeholders in our ethnography. Beyond being constructed as a set of skills that can be acquired and certified by powerful language industry’s official institutions such as Cambridge English or the Spanish Official Language Schools (Escuela Oficial de Idiomas), communicative competence in English is embedded in contentious language ideologies such as the native speaker’s ideology, which is embraced and contested by participants in our ethnography. Particularly, we will analyze the role of English communicative competence in “teaching partnerships” (Creese, 2002) between “native” language assistants (NLAs) and content teachers (CTs) at these schools, attending to hierarchies of knowledge (linguistic versus content expertise) and power relationships at work.

The analysis of two sets of classroom interactions in biology and religion classes co-taught by the NLA and these teachers reveal co-teaching tensions based on processes of social categorization and hierarchies of linguistic versus subject-matter competence. The interactional dimension of communicative competence would be further explained in relation to language policy discourse as well as the discursive construction of English communicative competence in teachers and students’ semi-structure interviews.

Authors

• Ana María Relaño-Pastor, Universidad de Castilla - La Mancha

• David Patrick Poveda, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid