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U.S. Speakers of Spanish as a Heritage Language: Pedogogical Practices for Language Rights

flyer for Megan Marshall talk, with head shot
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
Megan Marshall
Linguistic Justice in the Americas

The fields of second language acquisition and instruction in the U.S. have historically been concerned with the monolingual English speaker acquiring a 2nd language, in a classroom setting, for use abroad. In contrast, heritage speakers of Spanish are by definition bilingual with most of their language experience happening in their own homes and communities. Not surprisingly, models of acquisition and instruction adapted from the former context to the latter both underestimate heritage speakers language ability and misunderstand their instructional needs. This mismatch is often blamed on the students themselves, positioning them as somehow deficient (Higby et.al, 2023). So what makes the heritage Spanish speaker unique? What are their strengths and needs and how can each be addressed in a classroom setting? In this talk, Marshall will present a model for heritage language acquisition that takes into account the internal cognitive processes of language acquisition as well as the external cultural and sociolinguistic realities that can either encourage or discourage language use and development. In particular, she addresses the tension between different language varieties, including U.S. Spanish, and the standardized language varieties that are prioritized in Spanish classrooms. She then proposes a reimagining of the Spanish heritage classroom as a space for students to acquire both the linguistic and metalinguistic tools they need to define and defend their language rights. She argues that rather than focus on arbitrary and decontextualized grammatical structures, heritage Spanish classrooms must welcome and acknowledge the entirety of a student's language repertoire as both valid and valuable to their continued language development. When the primary goal of the language classroom is to serve the language goals heritage speakers define for themselves it serves as a foundation for continued language use and development beyond the classroom. Megan Marshall is an Assistant Instructional Professor of Spanish at the University of Chicago in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and Spanish Heritage Language Program Coordinator.