We don’t do anything: analysing the construction of legitimate knowledge in multilingual schools

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which what counts as legitimate knowledge is produced and negotiated in two multilingual classrooms of two different programmes designed to “attend to diversity” at secondary schools in the Madrid region. Following a sociolinguistic approach, the article focuses on the ways in which local identities, beliefs and social relations emerging from situated practice become a window through which to understand how different social experiences and academic trajectories are institutionally constructed in connection with broader social processes. For this reason, the article seeks to connect recorded and observed classroom interactional patterns, through which legitimate knowledge is produced, with social actors’ (teachers and students) positioning(s), and the academic trajectories of students enrolled in such programmes. We end with a discussion about the possible consequences of such practices for migrant students, recently arrived in the Madrid classrooms, in terms of academic success and school participation.

Keywords:

• sociolinguistic ethnography
• legitimate knowledge
• multilingual schools
• Spain
• immigrant students
• social interaction

Notes

1. Names of schools and participants have been changed to protect identities.

2. All methodological and analytical tools used in this article come from the research project “Socio-pragmatic analysis of intercultural communication in educational practices: towards social integration in the classroom” (BFF2003-04830) (Análisis socio-pragmático de la comunicación intercultural en las prácticas educativas: hacia la integración en las aulas), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and directed by Professor Luisa Martín-Rojo.

3. Recordings and interviews gathered in the fieldwork have been authorized by the participants.

4. Extracts in this article have been translated from Spanish, the only language of instruction in the contexts of the study. Original transcriptions are shown in Appendix 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adriana Patiño-Santos

Dr Adriana Patiño-Santos lectures at the Department of Modern Languages in the University of Southampton. Her research has focused on the relationship between (the different varieties of) Spanish speakers in multilingual contexts within the framework of the sociolinguistics of globalization. Language socialization processes as well as storytelling co-produced in (socio) linguistic ethnography have been the focus of her more recent research. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Linguistics and Education (2014), International Journal of Multilingualism (2014), Journal of Language, Identity, and Education (2013 and 2011) and Spanish in Context (2011 and 2012), amongst others.

Miguel Pérez-Milans

Miguel Pérez-Milans is assistant professor at the Division of English Language Education, The University of Hong Kong. He has published in international journals such as Journal of Language, Identity and Education (2011), Pragmatics (2011), Linguistics and Education (2012), Spanish in Context (2012), International Journal of Multilingualism (2014) and Language Policy (2015). He is the author of Modernization, Urban Schools, and English Language Education in Contemporary China: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography (2013), Routledge, and is currently co-editing with James W. Tollefson the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning (2017).

Ana María Relaño-Pastor

Ana María Relaño-Pastor is associate professor of applied linguistics at the Department of Modern Philology (English Studies), University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Spain. Her research interests include narrative, emotion and identity, language socialization, Spanish in the US, and bilingual education programmes in Spain. She has published her work in the Journal of Language Policy (2015), Spanish in Context (2012), Journal of Language, Identity and Education (2011), International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (2011) and Narrative Inquiry (2010). She is the author of Shame and Pride in Narrative: Mexican Women’s Experiences at the U.S.-Mexico Border (2014), Palgrave MacMillan.