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“No-one told me it would all be in Catalan!” – narratives and language ideologies in the Latin American community at school

  • Adriana Patiño-Santos EMAIL logo

Abstract

This article discusses the circulation of language ideologies through conversational narrative repertoires among Latin American parents in the secondary education system in Catalonia. Data, gathered in a linguistic ethnography carried out in three secondary schools in the metropolitan area of Barcelona between 2011 and 2013, include fieldwork in the classroom and other spaces of the school in different periods of the school year, as well as narrative repertoires gathered from in-depth interviews with some of the actors (students and parents of Latin American backgrounds). We focus on conversational narrative because it has proved to be an effective methodological resource for gathering evaluative and moral stances amongst tellers. Narrative data are triangulated with observational and interactional information. Some of the findings reveal, amongst other phenomena, the coexistence of a constellation of conflicting language ideologies regarding Catalan as the language of the school.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support of my colleagues Mireia Trenchs and Michael Newman, and especially Larissa Tristán, for sharing their ideas with me. I would also like to thank the Marc Aureli school community for supporting our research. the Catalan and Spanish language teachers, the students who were important mediators between the researchers and their parents, and the parents for agreeing to be interviewed.

Appendix: Symbols used in transcripts

PART: participant descending intonation
A (Capital letters) loud talking↑ rising intonation
aa lengthening of vowel or consonant→ continuing intonation
sound[] turn overlapping with similarly marked
/short pause (0.5 seconds)turn
//long pause (0.5 – 1.5 seconds)Cat: fragment in Catalan
(()) non-understandable fragment

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Published Online: 2018-3-2
Published in Print: 2018-3-26

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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