Zooming in on conceptions and ideas about English and Spanish in an ethnically indigenous school context

Abstract

Drawing on linguistic anthropology and the related research traditions of interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, this study aims on the one hand, at unveiling and questioning the ideas about English, Spanish and the ancestral language that can be inferred from the practices in pluriethnic classrooms in San Juan, Argentina and on the other hand, at establishing relationships between those ideas and the classroom dynamics. The speech events observed are the English lesson and the Spanish lesson in a rural secondary school in San Juan where students of Warpe descent attend classes. The methodological approach includes ethnographic fieldwork in English and in Spanish lessons, interviews with teachers, students and parents, and content analysis of the documents that contain the legislative framework for aboriginal education in Argentina. The results reveal that, through their teaching practices, the teachers make available ideas about English, Spanish and the ancestral language to the students. Moreover, the findings also suggest that the students’ ideas about English condition the students’ expectations about the English lesson as a speech event, its objective, their role and the teachers’ role as participants in the event. Additionally, the ideas they have about Spanish seem to have an effect on their behaviour in class. Another finding is the fact that there is a relationship between the students’ ideas about their ancestral language and Spanish and, on the other hand, between their degree of affiliation to the Warpe community and their ideas about these languages.