Tension and Contention in Language Education for Latinxs in the United States

Applying a critical lens to language education, this book explores the tensions that Latinx students face in relation to their identities, social and institutional settings, and other external factors. Across diverse contexts, these students confront complex debates and contestable affirmations that intersect with their lived experiences and social histories. Martinez and Train highlight the pedagogic and ethical urgency of teacher responsibility, learner agency and social justice in critically addressing the consequences, constraints, and affordances of the language education that Latinx students experience in historically-situated and institutionally defined spaces of practice, ideology and policy. Reframing language studies to take into account the roles of power, inequality, and social settings, this book provokes dialogue between areas of language education that rarely interface. Through privileging the learner experience, the book provides a window to the contested spaces across language education and generates new opportunities for engagement and action. Offering nuanced and insightful analyses, this book is ideal for scholars, language researchers, language teacher educators and graduate students in all areas of language education.

Glenn A. Martínez is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures at The Ohio State University, USA. Robert W. Train is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Sonoma State University, USA.

Chapter 1: State of Emergency in Language and Education in the 21st Century Chapter 2: Beyond Invention: The Language-ness of Experience in Institutional Perspective Chapter 3: Experiences of Mobility and Mobilization of Experience Chapter 4: Becoming Transformative Translingual Professionals Chapter 5: Language Experience in Language Education for Latinxs: Experiencing criticality, historicity and ethicality in our times