(Dis)Connections: Students' Perceptions of Their Sociolinguistic Needs in Spanish Heritage Language Classrooms

• In Event: 44.047 - Explorations of Bilingualism and Biliteracy as a Resource Across School, College, and Career: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Objectives
Current heritage language education research has yet to explore the potential impact of student input on heritage language curriculum (Beaudrie et al., 2009; Felix, 2009). In this paper, I share some initial findings on the ways in which students’ academic language experiences in linguistically diverse post-secondary Spanish heritage language (SHL) courses address students’ sociolinguistic needs. Positive academic language experiences can promote effective language development opportunities that build on students’ dynamic bilingualism (García, 2009). However, counterproductive academic language experiences can reinforce deficit views of students’ abilities that frame language courses as an opportunity to ‘fix’ what is ‘broken.’
Perspectives
My approach is shaped by García and Otheguy’s (2015) heteroglossic theory for understanding the bilingualism of U.S. Spanish-English speakers, which is “a speaker-centered view of Hispanic bilingualism, a disaggregated view of linguistic competence, and a translanguaging view of bilingual practices” (p. 639). This study created a space for heritage speakers to communicate how their sociolinguistic needs were met in SHL classes. Viewing bilingualism as a resource for learning and meaning making (Hornberger, 2003; Jiménez, García & Pearson, 1996; Pacheco & Gutierrez, 2008) illuminates how bilinguals draw on their linguistic repertoire, experiences with (an)other language(s) and notions of what is important to them.
Methods
This study relied on phenomenography, a second-order approach (Bowden, 2000; Marton, 1988; Orgill, 2007) that examined how people experienced a shared phenomenon: linguistically diverse SHL classrooms. Linguistic heterogeneity – when students are located along divergent points of the continua of biliteracy (Hornberger, 1989; Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester, 2000) – tends to occur in smaller SHL programs (Stafford, 2013) in geographic areas in which the history and use of the Spanish language are not as well established (Beaudrie, 2012). In this study, I asked: How do Spanish heritage speakers perceive the alignment of their self-reported sociolinguistic needs with the curriculum in their SHL classrooms?
Data sources
Fifteen participants responded to a questionnaire, and semi-structured phenomenographic interviews with five participants were dialogic in nature (Bowden, 2000), representing a “conversational partnership in which the interviewer” (Ashworth & Lucas, 2000, p. 302) and encouraging participants to reflect on their experience of the phenomenon. All data were compiled and transcribed and coded iteratively.
Results
Phenomenographic categories of description convey “a distinctively different way of experiencing or seeing the phenomenon” (Marton & Pang, 2008, p. 536) and the outcome space reveals “the relationship among the various categories of description” (p. 536). The outcome space is characterized by (dis)connectedness and the two categories of description I discuss are as follows: (1) a one-size-fits-all curriculum did not account for linguistic heterogeneity among bilingual students and (2) the (de)contextualized approach to HL instruction failed to recognize and leverage students’ home language practices.
Scholarly significance
This study explored how bilinguals understand the ways in which their sociolinguistic needs were or were not met in their post-secondary SHL classes. The findings advance our understanding of students’ sociolinguistic needs in SHL classrooms by examining student-generated perspectives, which can be leveraged to design and revise curriculum for similar classroom contexts.

Author

• Jason A. Kemp, University of Wisconsin - Madison