Integrating Bilingual Perspectives: Spanish in Teaching and Teaching in Spanish

Abstract

This presentation reviews the different traditions of Spanish in teaching and teaching Spanish that are present in the United States today -- foreign language teaching, heritage language teaching, and bilingual education. Currently these are relatively separate endeavors directed at different populations, but the blending of local and international interests brought about through globalization has spurred support for an integrated model of bilingual education with the potential to bridge the gap that has always existed between the use of Spanish in bilingual teaching, the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language, and the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language. Two-way dual language education can offer a space where students and teachers are forced to work in the gap created by different traditions of language education. We look at how one such program advances notions of bilingualism that go beyond the elite ones of foreign language education programs or the minority ones of transitional bilingual education programs. Such conceptual advances have several notable advantages: they work against externally imposed dual language structures, they build on the heteroglossia, or multiple voices, of children's discourse in such integrated classrooms, and they enable not only bilingual and biliteracy practices, but also plurilingual and pluriliteracy ones.