Bilingual Commodification in La Mancha: From Language Policies to Classroom Practices

This presentation focuses on the emergent discourses about bilingual commodification (Heller, 2010, ) in the current “boom” era of the Bilingual Programmes. These situated discourses dealing with “bilingualism” have been analysed among a group of students attending a prestigious religious semi-private “bi-trilingual” school in Castilla-La Mancha, where the social actors co- construct those discourses through interactions (Gumperz, 1982, ). From a critical discourse analysis perspective (Fairclough, 1995) and a critical interpretive approach (Tollefson, 2002), this linguistic ethnography analyses bilingual education in Castilla- La Mancha region as well as the links between the classroom social practice, the linguistic policies and wider social and ideological processes of globalization and neoliberalism in late modernity.