Using Cultural Models to Unravel How Bilingual Teachers Enact Language Policies

There have been calls to examine how language policy is mediated at the local level. Although there have been studies that have foregrounded the local, there have yet to be those that look at how language policies become adopted by individual teachers through a process of their personal and professional socialisation. Through the framework of cultural models and using ethnographic methods, I examine how four novice bilingual Latino/a teachers in three different schools in the United States come to share a cultural model of dual language education. At the same time, I highlight how the differences in their adoption of a particular policy are constituted by both their personal and professional experiences as well as the organisational structures in which they find themselves in. This study contributes to the understanding of how language policies are adopted by bilingual classroom teachers as well as to the discussion of the future of bilingual education in the United States.