Publications on the National Standards

This article is written for an audience interested in critical pedagogy. The author seeks to question notions of authenticity ("real Spanish") found in current popular culture (advertisements, Spanish language learning materials), by retracing the well-studied phenomenon of the creation of Spanish as a national standard language: He covers first the role of language in the rise of Spain's hegemonic imperial enterprise, then the reinvention of an American Spanish norm based on the new racialized social order of the independent colonies, and finally the ideologically laden representations of Spanish and Spanish speakers in the U.S. Train concludes with the recommendations that (1) language education should devote serious attention to the reality of heteroglossia—both regional and social variation—within a linguistic community, and that (2) L2 students should learn ethnographic techniques in addition to the more traditional linguistic syllabus so that they can adopt a critical stance to uncover implicit language ideologies and the consequences for the groups affected by them.

#Curriculum #Spanish #JournalArticle #TheoriesandMethods #LearnersandLearning #Outcomes #All #ClassroomExamples #Principalfocus #All5Cs #All