Exploring interaction to understand language policies practiced in the classroom

Abstract

What happens in classrooms in Catalonia when students and teachers come together to build knowledge, learn languages ​​and at the same time establish social and emotional relationships? In this text we offer some sociolinguistic and didactic tools to guide the observation of what Spolsky calls language policy as practices at school (practiced language policies, in Bonacina-Pugh’s terms). Exploring this dimension and particularly the dynamics between the language(s) of instruction and the language(s) of interaction seems crucial for training future or in-service teachers and for the stakeholders engaged in language education (school management teams, educational inspection, teacher trainers). Ethnography and conversation analysis are, from our point of view, adequate tools for the task of analyzing classroom interactions in multilingual contexts.