As Spanish heritage courses multiply all over the United States, the need to reexamine the curriculum and pedagogical approaches that are most appropriate to meet instructional goals is becoming increasingly pressing. Although several researchers have called for developing students' critical language awareness (CLA) in the Spanish heritage…

Introducing a distinction between language of ideas and language of display as a means of reconceptualizing what counts as "academic" language, I examine one brief stretch of talk by a small group of linguistically diverse 7th grade students in a U.S. mainstream social studies classroom designed to maximize academic and language…