Heritage Learners as Other: Reproducing Colonial Language Hierarchies in World Language Instructional Planning Resources

• In Event: Interrogating Othering Processes and the Hidden Racialization of Minoritized Students Through Good Intentions

Abstract

As the population of U.S. Spanish speakers continues to expand beyond traditional regions such as the Southwest and major urban centers (Hussar et al., 2020; United States Department of Education, 2020), schools without existing bilingual programs have struggled to find ways to expand the linguistic repertoire of their Spanish speaking students (Lozano, 2018). In regions with growing multilingual communities, opportunities for students to expand their Spanish repertoire are often limited to Spanish foreign language (SFL) courses due to sociopolitical issues that have limited the implementation of bilingual programs (Lozano, 2018). Because SFL classes have traditionally been designed for monolingual English speakers, SFL teachers — many of whom are white and learned Spanish as a ‘foreign’ language (Pascual y Cabo & Prada, 2018) — have perpetuated an Othering category of “heritage learners” to describe children who have existing receptive and/or productive skills in Spanish (Valdés, 2014).

A typical goal in SFL is attainment of ‘native-like’ proficiency of a ‘standard’ variety, which is presumed to provide a competitive edge in the global economy for English speakers (Larsen-Freeman & Freeman, 2008). Although native-like and standard are terms widely used within world language, they are concepts that have been increasingly criticized for creating unrealistic learning targets (Ortega, 2019). However, the recognition of unrealistic targets does not contend with how a native speaker of a standard variety is a construct rooted in a particular, colonial understanding of nation, race, and language. This understanding is a hidden truth in SFL instructional design.

By applying a Critical Discourse Analysis to The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL)’s Performance Descriptors document, this paper makes visible the colonial assumptions about language that determine what counts as language learning success and who counts as ‘legitimate’ users of Spanish. This is done by analyzing the formatting choices throughout the document and the vocabulary used to describe learners’ language and culture. The document was chosen because it is one of the main resources SFL teachers use to ground their instruction in the World Readiness Standards put forth by ACTFL (Lacorte & Suárez García, 2014). It describes benchmarks for language learner performance to help teachers “create performance tasks targeted to the appropriate performance range” (Sandrock & Swender, 2012).

The analysis reveals that the document places language practices into proficiency levels and describes learner language and culture as either “target” or “own”. These two actions continue the colonial practice of bounding and hierarchizing language. Just as hierarchies based on “primitiveness” were used to justify the colonial oppression of non-European people (Masuzawa, 2005), hierarchies based on proficiency and appropriateness contribute to the Othering of the heritage learner. This document continues to position the languaging of linguistically and racially minoritized students as incorrect and non-academic (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Leeman, 2018). SFL teachers of heritage learners must reevaluate the use of the Performance Descriptors in order to fight against the ‘truth’ that the language of their heritage learners needs to be fixed.

Author

• Rebecca E. Sawyer, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author