Supporting Heritage Speakers of Spanish by Unforgetting No-Child-Left-Behind: Mediating Linguistic (In)Security Through Multilingual Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Linguistic Justice and Heritage Education

Abstract

This preliminary, longitudinal, mixed-methods study explored whether and how French mediates linguistic (in)security experienced by college-level Heritage Speakers of Spanish schooled during the No-Child-Left-Behind era (2002-2015). Framed by Complex Dynamic Systems Theory, raciolinguistics and LangCrit, it quantitatively evaluated linguistic (in)security changes using Driver's (2023) D-LIS, bootstrapped descriptive statistics, Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test, and Kendall s tau-b correlations, while ethnographically portraying experiences in a case study comprising interviews and classroom observations that underwent three cycles of coding. Counterintuitive patterns of quantitative linguistic (in)security appeared, at odds with deeply ingrained experiences of linguistic insecurity reported ethnographically. Findings also showed that authority figures in the classroom mediate the influence French instruction has on speakers and their linguistic (in)security towards Spanish.

Author

• Scarlet Peterson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign