Working with texts in a bilingual schoolBook work-Comentario de texto

Resumen

This paper examines the social dimension of teaching and learning processes in the bilingual classroom. I will look at one area of the Spanish government provision for Spanish "residentes" in Britain, the bilingual school in London. I will describe an ethnographic study that I carried out there with secondary school pupils. My focus is primarily on classroom processes and, in particular on talk around texts. I have divided this paper into two broad categories namely, curriculum organization and pedagogy (Fishman, 1977). In the first part, I will examine how the curriculum was organised in the English and Spanish lessons that I observed, together with a description of the in structional materials used and the separation approach adopted by school policy. In the second part, I will deal with some pedagogical issues: a) the nature and length of the texts used in the lessons; b) commonalities and differences when dealing with texts; c) the interactional practices around the texts and the different teaching styles when doing English and Spanish. Finally, I will draw some conclusions.