In order to achieve bilingualism in the students of a private school in a medium-sized city in Colombia, a totally monolingual context, I and a group of professionals in the institution designed a curriculum based on authentic communicative performances, connecting developments in Spanish and English.I directed parallel qualitative research on its impact during the first year of its use, revealing great changes in the language learning environments in the school and a variety of levels of understanding of this founding principle among the teachers.This diversity in understanding comes almost exclusively from the authentic pedagogical performance of radically changing conceptions and practices of what has to happen in the classroom.