RC25 Language & Society Newsletter

The main objective of this study is to describe the context of the features of the sociocultural, economical and linguistics of the native teachers in bilingual education in the region of Valle del Mezquital in México; talking about their language history, and professional formations in the language usage in the classroom.

Analyzing the language and sociocultural features of the native teachers in elementary education through the pressure model makes it is possible to observe the weakeness of the native languages. This is not only because of the attitude or language competence of the speakers but is also compounded by the unequal social, cultural and economic relationships of power that are present in  daily life during the communication proceses of the indigenous population in the various domains, such as education, family, and work.

One of the features of these teachers is their literacy in Spanish language. This has enabled them to build a socially shared knowledge in Spanish about the academic contents of the school which is now a shared facility, producing such a knowledge day by day through the teaching work with students, so that the indigenous language is taken away from the scholarly domain.

On the other hand, the self perception of their language competence is a factor that acts as a contrary pressure or the fear of failure in communication, and this leads to an experimental, ideological conflict inside the paradigms of competition which reafirms the history of opression that indigenous people have endured for centuries.

The characteristics pointed out above in association with the lack of  didactic materials and books in hñähñu, the lack of definitive plans and programs for language teaching, and the presence of trilingual people each day produced by the migration phenomenon, are all facts that contribute little to the vitality of the minority language.