BE BILINGUAL

BE BILINGUAL

Speaking English
1. Speaking English has been deified as an asset in the sense that it only brings benefits to those who learn it, mainly as the access to a modern world characterized by technology, wider communication, economic power, scientific knowledge, and the like (Maurais, 2003).
Bilingualism as a monolithic and homogeneous concept
The British Council
1. The Ministry of Education (MEN)
  1. Basic standards for competences in foreign languages: English. Teaching in foreign languages: The challenge!
    1. Critical discourse analysis (CDA)
      1. - Van Dijk: CDA is a type of discourse that studies the way social problems are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. -Cameron the main task of CDA is to uncover “hidden agendas” in discourse in order to unveil power relationships. - Fairclough: As such, the purpose of CDA is to show how social structures shape the form of discourse and at the same time how discourse shapes social structures
        discourse analysis inspired by social theory
        pure linguistic analysis
        SFL approach
        identity, relational and ideational ideational, interpersonal and textual
        Interpretation
        Explanation
        Description
    2. Symbolic power (especially language as symbolic power)
      1. - Bourdieu: “symbolic power is the power to make things with words, “that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it”” (p. 23) [...] the fact that a group, a class, a region a nation, starts to exist when they are recognized as such by receiving a name, by being differentiated from others. [...]
      2. no discourse is neutral; there is always a purpose to serve the interest of specific individual or groups presented in a hidden or subtle way
Bilingualism is based on a set of myths
¿ ...Bilingualism... ?
1. Speaking English
  1. saying “foreign languages” the possibility of “second languages” is excluded, which in Colombia could be any of the indigenous languages spoken
  2. There are many excerpts written by the Ministry of education, that show the necessities that exist around English learning but all of those are taking in a general form without take into account the different circumstances that could appear throughout the English learning and teaching process.
    1. Being bilingual is essential in the globalized world
    2. “having citizens able to communicate in English in such a way that they move the country into universal communication processes, into the global economy, and into a cultural openness with internationally comparable standards.
    3. In the Colombian context and for the sake of this proposal, English is considered a foreign language. Given its importance as a universal language, the Ministry of Education has established, as one of the core points of its educational policy, the improvement of the quality of the teaching of English, leading to better performance levels in this language.
2. Bilingualism as a monolithic and homogeneous concept
  1. All students will be equally proficient
    1. Bilingualism
      1. - Bloomfield: the native-like control of two languages. - Macnamara: persons who possess at least one of the language skills even to a minimal degree in their second language - Grosjean: [...]bilinguals [are] those people who use two (or more) languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives.
    2. the authors of the “Estándares” set up the goals of the PNB as a packed whole, implying that the proficiency level must be the same for everybody regardless of the needs, resources, context, socio-economic situation, and/or motivation of students.
  2. All students will attain level B1 (and along with that, they will become legitimate users of L2)
    1. The idea behind this goal is that learners/students can become ideal proficient speakers because language is conceived of as a good that can be obtained and used by anyone at any moment.
      1. Although in the standards proposed by the MEN all students are assumed to be legitimate speakers, the truth is that they are not because their legitimacy is not only acquired by speaking the “right” variety of the language, that is, the variety sanctioned and evaluated by the dominant groups as the valuable one and transmitted through the education system (Bourdieu, 2003)
  3. Students as a monolithic population
    1. The excerpts written by MEN, promote the education in all parts of Colombia without thinking in the problems that can have different regions of the country. Not all students and all context are developing in the same way, not all children have the easy access to education, there are children that have to work since they are little, there is violence that affects the process

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	Created by Lorena Ruiz about 9 years ago