Heritage Language Teaching

Critical Language Awareness Perspectives for Research and Pedagogy

Sergio Loza, Sara M. Beaudrie, Sergio Loza, Sara M. Beaudrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367708412
• eBook ISBN: 9781000479881
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This innovative, timely text introduces the theory, research, and classroom application of critical approaches to the teaching of minoritized heritage learners, foregrounding sociopolitical concerns in language education. Beaudrie and Loza open with a global analysis, and expert contributors connect a focus on speakers of Spanish as a heritage language in the United States to broad issues in heritage language education in other contexts – offering an overview of key concepts and theoretical issues, practical pedagogical guidance, and field-advancing suggestions for research projects. This is an invaluable resource for advanced students and scholars of applied linguistics and education, as well as language program administrators.

1The Central Role of Critical Language Awareness in Spanish Heritage Language Education in the United StatesAn Introduction

Sara M. Beaudrie and Sergio Loza

DOI: 10.4324/9781003148227-1

Since its inception, the foundational principle of Spanish heritage language (SHL) education has been that the field needs theories, pedagogical principles, and curricular interventions that are distinct from those of foreign language instruction. Beginning with the pioneering work of Guadalupe Valdés in the late 1970s and the 1980s, scholars and pedagogues have generated a large body of research that (re)imagines Spanish language instruction in ways that are responsive to the social, linguistic, educational, and affective needs of the ever-growing US Latinx student population. As the field developed with each passing decade, new proposals and guiding principles established a transformative agenda that contests the historical inequities the Latinx community faces in language education. Three “waves” of criticality can be identified in this trajectory towards a vision in which the purpose of language education is to contest and correct the discriminatory practices and discourses that disparage SHL students and their bilingual varieties and instead to offer them a quality educational experience. Such transformative educational practices are meant both to improve Latinx education overall and to promote SHL maintenance in the United States.

With the aim of moving the field a step further, this volume centers on critical language awareness (CLA) and brings together cutting-edge research that reflects the current state of affairs in SHL and heritage language (HL) education more broadly. As a growing number of HL scholars from different perspectives continue to add to conversations around criticality and social change, we frame these vital dialogues, ideas and discussions within, what we call, the “critical turn” in HL education. In the current critical turn, critical paradigms vested in educational equity are increasingly informing research and praxis in SHL.

Within language education, achieving equity entails reflecting upon the long-unquestioned beliefs and ideologies regarding language and language teaching that have shaped the educational and institutional context centering Spanish. The quest to design and implement a curriculum for US Latinx students has revealed critical questions about the real-world impact of language instruction and its potential to become a transformative learning experience for SHL learners. Moreover, this endeavor necessarily requires examining the various roles that language ideologies play in the decisions language program administrators and instructors take with respect to SHL learners’ varieties. By engaging in difficult discussions regarding the instructional goals and assumptions towards language teaching and minoritized language learners, language teachers and language programs can contribute to creating an equitable educational future for the Latinx community and supporting Spanish maintenance in the U.S. As researchers and practitioners have become increasingly cognizant of the various ways SHL learners’ educational experiences hinge on dominant ideologies in Spanish departments/programs and in the larger university context (see Beaudrie & Loza, 2021), they have become more focused on developing pedagogical frameworks aimed at dismantling ideological systems that are interwoven with dominant social constructs of race, gender, socioeconomic status, education, and the nation-state.

CLA is a theoretical and pedagogical framework with the potential to correct the social injustices that SHL scholars have long observed and contested at the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of US society (e.g., Bernal-Enríquez & Hernández-Chávez, 2003; Villa, 2002; Zentella, 1997b). The notion of critical is understood as an explicit positionality against ideological and institutional discrimination, and by this measure we acknowledge that each epoch of scholarly research was, in fact, “critical” in its own way. Many SHL experts are presently able to question the sociopolitical underpinnings of language instruction because of the advocacy and insights of trailblazing researchers who provided invaluable insights into how ideologies become embodied in curricular, programmatic, and teaching practices.

Developed in the 1990s by researchers in the United Kingdom, CLA was proposed as an improvement over language awareness models for teaching groups of speakers whose language practices or language varieties are deemed inferior to the so-called standard. In their seminal work, Clark et al. (1990, 1991) argued that critical discussions of the hierarchies of power were necessary in language and literacy instruction. Instead of teaching privileged language forms with the intention of integrating learners into dominant social orders and language practices, CLA aims at emancipation from such systems of power. Whereas language awareness seeks merely to teach learners how their speech deviates from dominant ways of knowing and using language, CLA develops the “operational and descriptive knowledge of the linguistic practices of their world, but also a critical awareness of how these practices are shaped by, and shape, social relationships of power” (Clark et al., 1990, p. 249). The overarching objectives of CLA are to “empower learners by providing them with a critical analytical framework to help them reflect on their own language experiences and practices, the language practices of others in the institutions of which they are a part and in the wider society within which they live” (Clark & Ivanič, 1997, p. 217). These tenets are increasingly becoming central to contemporary research and praxis in HL education, affording scholars a powerful lens through which to critically interrogate important educational issues relating to language and society. By adopting the CLA philosophy at the onset of the 21st century, SHL scholars embarked on a collective effort to reexamine and contest long-held assumptions and practices within the L2-oriented Spanish teaching profession in the United States. This critical turn in the SHL field has better informed and equipped researchers and practitioners to forge new paths towards educational equity and justice for the Latinx youth enrolled in language courses all over the country (also see Alim, 2010; Fairclough, 1992; Godley et al., 2015). As Villa (2010) explains, Spanish for Native Speakers (SNS) programs first expanded throughout the US in the late 1970s and 1980s: “these programs were often rooted in the notion that the Spanish skills brought to the classroom were deficient and needed remediation and correcting” (p. 122). Under the ideology that all Spanish varieties are linguistically legitimate, scholars continued to develop SNS programs to address such educational disparities stemming from linguistic discrimination (Leeman, 2005). As a result of this development, diverging viewpoints relating to the goals of SNS programs emerged. Leeman (2005, p. 37) argues that two main strands of pedagogy can be identified:

(a) a more normative approach that emphasizes the expansion of heritage speakers’ linguistic repertoires to include prestige varieties and formal registers, and (b) a more critical approach that attempts to make heritage speakers’ own linguistic experience a more central part of the classroom and to foster awareness of linguistic and sociolinguistic principles related to Spanish in the United States.

The following sections describe the specific pedagogical practices related to the abovementioned dichotomy that continue to impact HL research and pedagogy.

The First Wave (1981–1999)

Fundamental questions regarding the treatment of US Spanish and its speakers in society have shaped the field from its inception. During the early period, researchers focused on crafting a convincing case for carving out a separate space for Latinx students, without yet having clear instructional objectives or theoretical directions. This advocacy rested on Valdés’s (1997) descriptions of the erasure of Latinx students’ educational needs as well as the discrimination they endured in the classroom because of the variety of Spanish they used. In the typical situation, SHL learners were expected to “catch up” to their L2 peers in upper-division courses or to entirely relearn Spanish because what they had learned at home was not “correct Spanish.” SHL learners and the Spanish they speak were viewed through a language as a problem orientation (see Ruiz, 1984), As Martínez (2012, p. 66) states, “SHL textbooks clearly portrayed the Spanish spoken by students as problematic, corrupt, and deriving from an ignorance of the language … such pedagogical approaches recalled the violent and dehumanizing ‘No Spanish’ language repression rules that existed throughout the Southwest.” In general, Latinx students were expected not to disrupt the traditional language learning curriculum based on second language methods. Often, they were placed in remedial Spanish courses with the expectation that they would later “pass” as L2 learners in upper-level courses, if and when they were deemed linguistically ready.

Such early works are filled with researchers’ observations or personal and professional experiences of eradicationist (also known as limited normative or subtractive) curricular and instructional practices (see also Rodríguez Pino, 1997; Rodríguez Pino & Villa, 1994). The eradication approach used grammar instruction to identify the extent to which each learner’s bilingual dialect deviated from the accepted norm and to erase all non-normative variants from the student’s repertoire (Valdés-Fallis, 1978). The goals of this approach were:

1. To make learners conscious of the differences between their variety and a privileged variety of Spanish.
2. To provide se dice/no se dice lists for (mostly lexical) comparisons between non-privileged and privileged varieties.
3. To eliminate anglicisms and archaisms, replacing them with standard features through mechanical vocabulary and grammar drills (Rodríguez Pino, 1997).
4. To teach traditional grammar so that students would notice morphological differences between their variety and the standard.
5. To eliminate non-privileged phonological features.

As Valdés (1981) explained, educators who followed this philosophy felt a “solemn” responsibility to aid learners in freeing themselves of the wrong dialect features and becoming speakers of the “correct” language variety, “well known to be a passport to achievement, success and acceptance” (p. 15). At the same time, however, explicit scholarly conversations began regarding the discriminatory beliefs and value systems within university language departments:

Traditionally language and literature instructors have been elitists, narrow-minded academicians unwilling to let go of those norms that, in a sense, justify their privileged ranks in the profession. The suggestion of a new approach or the questioning of those dearly acquired norms clearly constitutes a threat to instructors interested in maintaining the status quo. Many Chicano students fall into the hands of these language purists and suffer the predictable consequences. It is well-known that Chicano students are often automatically designated as C students in Spanish language classes, whether their instructors are Spaniards, Latin American, or Chicano themselves.

(Sánchez, 1981, p. 92)

As Sánchez reminded us, the pervasive ideologies that sustain and reinforce monolingual ideologies are entrenched in academe (see also Leeman, 2012), in everyday educational decisions regarding the Spanish spoken by individual SHL learners (Beaudrie & Loza, in press; Loza, 2017; 2019; this volume). Such pedagogical decision-making peripheralizes – and sometimes completely erases – the intellectual, cultural, and linguistic contributions of US Latinxs within the higher education context (see Alvarez, 2013). During this time, researchers’ observations of the ideological mechanisms in operation and their discussions of the role these mechanisms played in the Spanish language classroom laid the foundation for a future and more sociopolitically conscious critical research agenda.

During this first wave, research yielded new insights into the educational needs of SHL learners (Beaudrie & Fairclough, 2012; Leeman & Martínez, 2007). Based on Freirian and Vygotskyan constructs of learning, scholars advocated for an instructional change wherein “the student assumes a central position in the learning process … instead of playing a passive role in the classroom” (Rodríguez Pino & Villa, 1994, p. 355), thus, further advancing a student-centered vision of SHL methodology. Focusing on the HL learner, Valdés (199...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 The Central Role of Critical Language Awareness in Spanish Heritage Language Education in the United States: An Introduction
• Part I Pedagogical and Theoretical Foundations
• PART II Pedagogical Innovations
• Part III CLA across Different Education Contexts
• Index