Competing discourses of academic Spanish in the Texas-Mexico borderlands

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this descriptive study the efforts of a faculty to prepare a cohort of pre-service bilingual education teachers to pass a newly adopted state certification test of academic Spanish are presented. The faculty’s efforts were aimed at offsetting a low pass rate on this test, but unfortunately efforts fell short. To unpack this outcome, the authors use a theoretical lens aimed at examining the dominant Discourses associated with academic Spanish. Through this analysis the authors maintain that at the national, state, local, and program levels the dominant Discourses associated with academic Spanish work jointly to undermine the acquisition of academic Spanish needed by prospective bilingual education teachers.