SANTILLANA USA - Galeria Whitepaper

What can educators expect from Galería de lengua y cultura? • Activities and strategies that teach, practice, reinforce, and enrich Spanish in context as a world language, native language, or heritage language. • Learning activities that seamlessly integrate academic language and culture, while promoting bilingualism and biculturalism. • Authentic texts that connect to all content areas. Galería de lengua y cultura is a unique concept because of: • its purpose • its intended reach • the authenticity of the materials and the way these are presented • the richness of its content What is the purpose of Galería lengua y cultura? The main purpose of Galería de lengua y cultura is to provide students who are already able to converse in and understand Spanish the opportunity to practice, maintain, develop, and refine their vocabulary and language skills by offering a unique program. This is a program that can be implemented in a variety of settings, including Spanish Language Arts and Language Immersion. Spanish and Language Arts constitute a unique idea in the United States because the U. S. is a Spanish- speaking country that does not have Spanish as its official language. Spanish speakers make up almost seventeen percent of the nation’s population, and according to the US Census Bureau’s 2016 count (2018), people of Hispanic origin or heritage are the largest minority in the United States. Only Mexico has a larger Spanish-speaking population than the United States. Thirteen percent of the population in the United States speaks Spanish at home. Galería de lengua y cultura aims to reach those Spanish heritage speakers who have already acquired an informal language with which they communicate with family and friends, but who have not developed an appropriate range of vocabulary, context, and registers in Spanish to achieve academic success. In addition, the program addresses the needs of these heritage speaker students to acquire and refine their Spanish literacy skills, develop their reading and writing skills, and attain language proficiency. The number of students of Hispanic heritage students enrolled in schools in grades K–12 is approximately eighteen million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018) To meet the needs of these students; Galería de lengua y cultura presents a native language arts curriculum in Spanish that mirrors the English Language Arts curriculum. That is, the scope and sequence is organized following the national Spanish Language Arts Standards, but it is also aligned to the World Languages Standards, among others, whenever the program is used in a World Languages setting or other situations. (Mario Castro, personal interview, July 27, 2018). The American National Council of Teachers of English identifies five basic categories for the teaching of English and Language Arts: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. In middle and high schools, students apply their basic reading skills to form more complex and analytical comprehension of literature (“Teaching English and Language Arts,” 2018). Spanish Language Arts is critically important for students who speak Spanish as a heritage language because students need to practice specific writing, speaking, reading, and listening skills accurately and naturally. Both fluency and comprehension in reading are critical to understanding nearly everything that is taught (“Why is English Language Arts so Important?”, 2017). Based on this focus, Galería de lengua y cultura fosters the development of bilingual/