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

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.