Native speakerism and the construction of CLIL competence in teaching partnerships: reshaping participation frameworks in the bilingual classroom

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Native speakerism
• CLIL
• linguistic ethnography
• teaching partnerships
• classroom interactions

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We would also like to acknowledge Ulpiano Losa for helping us with data transcription. Many thanks to Alicia Fernández, Frances Giampapa, Helena Aikin, Esther Nieto and Miguel Pérez-Milans for their contribution to enthusiastically keep our research dialogues open to transformation. Last but not least, our special gratitute to St. Teo’s teachers for opening their classrooms and sharing with us their daily practice and personal stories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) in Spain lasts four years and is for students between 12-16 years of age.

2 La Mancha City (LMC) is the pseudonym we will use for the locality where ethnographic fieldwork was conducted. It is a mid-sized city, centered primarily on public administration and a service economy, located in a largely rural/semi-rural area of the Castilla-La Mancha region. We also use pseudonyms for the four schools involved in fieldwork.

3 Transcriptions follow a simplified version of Conversation Analysis (CA) conventions. Turns in Spanish and brief instances of code-switching are indicated in { }. Longer sequences in Spanish are transcribed in the original language with a line-by-line translation below.

Additional information

Funding

Data in this article belongs to the APINGLO-CLM project ‘The appropriation of English as a global language in Castilla-La Mancha secondary schools: A multilingual, situated and comparative approach’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Plan Nacional I + D + I 2014/Reference: FFI2014-54179-C2-2-P). It has also been possible thanks to the funds granted to the Research Consolidated Group LADIC, UCLM, co-financed by the European Union and the European Regional Development Fund (Ref: 2019-GRIN-26973).