Interpreting teacher talk in the Spanish language classroom: Teachers’ reflections on their beliefs and practice

Abstract

In line with the multimodal turn in second language (L2) teaching and learning, this study investigates the ways in which teachers of Spanish as an L2 rely on multimodal resources for classroom communication. Informed by Farrell’s (2015) Framework for Reflecting on Practice, four L2 Spanish teachers in an urban school district in southeast United States reflect on their beliefs regarding target language (TL) and first language (L1) use for instruction and whether these beliefs align with their classroom practice. Using data generated from classroom observations and semi-structured interviews, findings indicate that teachers value authentic language use, which for multilinguals can include reliance on a shared L1 and other visual aids, reflective of translanguaging practices. However, in practice, teachers’ language-use is constrained by unique contexts, including individual student needs and programme design. Implications for this work include the benefit of critical reflection as a tool to raise teachers’ self-awareness of language alternations and use of semiotic resources, promoting intentionality behind pedagogically supported teacher talk.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.