Renée DePalma – författare

Policy Meets Practice: A Multimodal Exploration of Language Education in Galician Schools examines how language policy operates in classroom settings by analysing the processes through which policy is articulated, contextualised, and enacted in everyday pedagogical practice.This collection of studies into the experiences of teachers in Galicia, where Galician, Spanish, signed, and migrant languages coexist, offers scholars globally a foundation for understanding the central role of educators in the interpretation, negotiation, and enactment of language policy. Using a multimodal methodological framework that combines critical discourse analysis, qualitative interviews, and visual data, the book examines the institutional, ideological, and material conditions that shape how educators work with linguistic diversity in their classrooms. In doing so, it brings together scholarship on autochthonous minority, migrant, and signed languages, and interrogates the persistent separation of these in policy discourse and educational practice.Policy Meets Practice will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, and multilingual education who will gain critical insights into the relationship between language, policy, and education.

Based on an extended ethnographic study of a dual language (Spanish-English) Kindergarten, this book takes a critical look at children's linguistic (and non-linguistic) interactions and the ways that teaching design can help or hinder language development. With a focus on official “Spanish time”, it explores the particular challenges of supporting the minority language use as well as the teacher's strategies for doing so. In bilingual classrooms, teachers' goals include bilingualism as well as academic achievement for all. The children may share these interests, but have their own agendas as well. This book explores the linguistic and social interactions that may help, or hinder, these multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. How can teachers design educational practice that takes into consideration broader forces of language hegemony as well as children's immediate interests?

Based on an extended ethnographic study of a dual language (Spanish-English) Kindergarten, this book takes a critical look at children's linguistic (and non-linguistic) interactions and the ways that teaching design can help or hinder language development. With a focus on official “Spanish time”, it explores the particular challenges of supporting the minority language use as well as the teacher's strategies for doing so. In bilingual classrooms, teachers' goals include bilingualism as well as academic achievement for all. The children may share these interests, but have their own agendas as well. This book explores the linguistic and social interactions that may help, or hinder, these multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas. How can teachers design educational practice that takes into consideration broader forces of language hegemony as well as children's immediate interests?

This focused case study analyses the roots of super-diversity in a place where immigration is an emerging phenomenon, Northwestern Spain (Galicia).