Education for Bilingualism: Connecting Spanish and English from the Curriculum, into the Classroom, and Beyond

I present here the results of a qualitative research study on the impact of a curriculum that connects learning events in Spanish and English in authentic communicative performances during its first year of use in a private school in a medium-size Colombian city. I did discourse analysis of interviews with participating teachers and class observations including small in-situ interviews with teachers and students. They revealed positive changes in the language learning environments of the school, the teachers' ideas about language and language learning, and the students' communicative skills and ways of learning. I use these results to introduce the concept of education for bilingualism to replace that of bilingual education we use in Colombia. I find the practices of the latter ineffective in our mostly monolingual context.