ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, we discussed the development of the curriculum in the Ann Arbor Languages Partnership. The key feature of this curriculum was what we defined as “teachability,” which meant that the curriculum needed to be accessible for students learning Spanish and well scaffolded for the Apprentice Teachers who would teach it. Accessibility for students was based on two main features of the curriculum: that it would be credible to students, parents, and community members in how it captured and represented language in the world, and that it would be embedded in the general curriculum such that Spanish would not become simply a ‘subject language’ (Larsen-Freeman and Freeman, 2008). These features of teachability for students were critical to the Partnership's goal that learning new languages could visibly and transparently support and contribute to language diversity as a form of social capital within the community and district. To realize these goals, the project drew on a young and largely inexperienced teaching force: a group of about 40 students in the first year, most of whom were university undergraduates studying for degrees in Spanish, and/or heritage or mother tongue speakers of the language, who would teach the Spanish language curriculum in 63 third grade classrooms in the district's 20 elementary schools.
