Outcomes of University Spanish Heritage Language Instruction in the United States

Melissa A. Bowles

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781647122232, 9781647122225
• eBook ISBN: 9781647122249
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Spanish Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Outcomes of University Spanish Heritage Language Instruction in the United States addresses for the first time how receiving heritage classroom instruction affects Spanish speakers on multiple levels, including linguistic, affective, social, and academic outcomes. Scholars and educators alike will benefit from this volume’s rich insights.

PART I

Morphosyntactic Outcomes

ONE

Modality Matters! A Look at Task-Based Outcomes

Julio Torres

University of California, Irvine

The variability exhibited within and across heritage language (HL) bilingual speakers’ grammars is a salient feature of HL outcomes (e.g., Montrul 2016). While monolingual native speakers can demonstrate variable knowledge of low-frequency lexical items and complex grammatical constructions (Hulstijn 2015), HL speakers, as bilingual native speakers of the HL, exhibit greater variability since they are managing more than one language. This variability can be explained to some extent by HL speakers’ differences in exposure to the HL from an early age. Adult HL speakers who received early schooling in the HL, for example, demonstrate grammatical knowledge that aligns more closely to those of monolingual natives (e.g., Kupisch et al. 2014; Torres, Estremera, and Mohamed 2019). Another factor that appears to contribute to this variable behavior is the modality of experimental tasks. Studies have documented that HL speakers’ performance largely depends on the modality of the experimental task in that HL participants demonstrate superior performance on oral experimental tasks vis-à-vis written ones (e.g., Montrul, Foote, and Perpiñán 2008; Alarcón 2011; Montrul et al. 2014; Torres, Estremera and Mohamed 2019). This observation is mostly due to HL speakers’ early and prolonged prior language experience using the HL in oral communication in a naturalistic environment (e.g., Sanz and Torres 2018). However, what remains unclear is whether modality can also differentially alter HL learners’ performance on assessment tasks that aim to measure language development from pedagogical interventions. To further explore this issue, the goal of this chapter is to provide empirical evidence on whether assessment modality (i.e., oral vs. written) can alter university-level HL learners’ access to knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive in adjectival relative clauses as a result of task-based instruction. The findings of this study will have implications for the design of pedagogical intervention studies as well as pedagogical practices with HL learners.

Literature Review

HL Speakers’ Performance on Oral and Written Experimental Tasks

A number of empirical studies with university-level HL speakers of Spanish have documented the nature of their knowledge of the HL through experimental tasks manipulated for modality. Silvina Montrul, Rebecca Foote, and Silvia Perpiñán (2008) investigated HL and second language (L2) speakers’ acquisition of Spanish gender agreement through oral and written experimental tasks. Their findings indicated that while both HL and L2 learners exhibited a pattern of gender agreement errors, the modality of the experimental tasks differentially affected the degree of those errors for each group of speakers, with HL speakers demonstrating more control of the target form in the oral production task. The authors attributed their results to the context and mode of acquisition of the HL and L2 speakers. That is, HL speakers are exposed to more oral input in a naturalistic environment, whereas L2 speakers acquire the language with a greater amount of written input in classroom contexts. Irma Alarcón (2011) also examined Spanish gender agreement, but with advanced HL and L2 speakers. Similar to Montrul and colleagues, Alarcón found that her HL participants performed at monolingual native-like levels in the oral production task, especially in comparison to L2 speakers.

Montrul and colleagues (2014) administered three aural experimental tasks to measure HL and L2 participants’ explicit and implicit knowledge of Spanish gender agreement. Given that previous research had shown that HL speakers demonstrated suboptimal performance on more explicit experimental tasks (Bowles 2011a), their goal was to minimize the role of modality by administering all aural tasks to investigate HL speakers’ performance on explicit tasks. Indeed, the researchers found that HL and L2 participants performed equally well on the explicit tasks and HL participants demonstrated superior performance on the implicit task. More recently, Julio Torres, Ricardo Estremera, and Sherez Mohamed (2019) investigated the predictive nature of psychosocial individual differences (e.g., motivation) and biographical variables (e.g., frequency of language use) on HL learners’ access to linguistic knowledge of vulnerable structures (e.g., gender agreement, past subjunctive mood) in HL acquisition. The researchers administered an oral and a written experimental task testing the same vulnerable structures. The findings revealed that HL learners demonstrated superior performance on the oral experimental task, and, interestingly, individual differences only predicted participants’ performance on the written experimental task.

These studies imply that the modality of the experimental task determines the ease or difficulty with which HL speakers access their linguistic knowledge in the HL. This is due to HL speakers’ prolonged exposure to mostly oral input in the HL since childhood, whereas their exposure to written input in the HL will vary according to differences such as early schooling in the HL. Therefore, because of this context of bilingual acquisition, HL speakers develop stronger linguistic representations of the HL in an oral mode. From a usage-based theoretical account, this outcome can be explained by the high frequency and cue consistency of oral input (and not written input) during HL speakers’ first language (L1) acquisition experience, which are most likely determinants of the type of form-function mappings that become entrenched linguistic representations in HL speakers’ grammars (e.g., Lieven and Tomasello 2008). Thus, as Elena Lieven and Michael Tomasello argued, “the strength and nature of representations that different tasks draw on may differ” (2008, 191), which can explain how HL speakers’ superior performance on oral experimental tasks is indicative of stronger linguistic representations of the HL. Due to this prior language learning experience of HL bilinguals, however, what remains unknown empirically is whether adult HL learners, who decide to (re)learn the HL in an instructed setting, will retrieve with equal ease linguistic constructions across oral and written modes as a result of instruction. That is, do adult HL learners’ stronger linguistic representations in oral mode provide them a learning advantage in oral production that results from pedagogical interventions?

Researching Assessment Modality in L2 Acquisition

The field of L2 acquisition has long been interested in the design of assessment tasks because it can determine the type of L2 linguistic knowledge that is elicited (e.g., Bialystok 1982; Sanz 1997; Ellis 2009). Researchers have claimed that the variability often observed in L2 performance can be attributed in part to the demands that an assessment task places on L2 speakers such as tapping into explicit and implicit knowledge (e.g., Ellis 2009) or into comprehension and production of the L2 (e.g., De Jong 2005). For example, Paul Malovrh (2014) found that gender agreement with Spanish direct object clitics was evident in oral and written production at the beginning stages of L2 development but not necessarily in later stages. As such, the assessment task can alter the type of linguistic knowledge elicited, as an “individual learner’s retrieval procedures vary according to the demands of the situation, the information required and the fluency or automaticity of the individual’s control over the information” (Bialystok 1982, 183).

For instructed L2 acquisition contexts, Cristina Sanz (1997) proposed that the mode of the assessment task ought to be considered an important variable because mode places different cognitive demands on the L2 speaker. To test this claim, Sanz (1997) administered four assessment tasks to forty-four L2 learners of Spanish, which consisted of the following: an oral sentence completion task, an oral video retelling task, a written sentence completion task, and a written video retelling task. Participants who were assigned to the experimental condition were exposed to processing instruction (e.g., VanPatten 2004) on the use of accusative clitics (e.g., Ella la abraza “She hugs her”) in Spanish. Her results overall revealed that participants exhibited significantly superior performance in the written assessment tasks vis-à-vis the oral assessment tasks. These results imply that the oral assessment tasks placed higher cognitive demands on the L2 participants, which competed for attentional and memory resources that would have facilitated the retrieval of the target form. According to Sanz, the oral assessment task placed a greater burden on L2 learners’ processor to encode the production of their messages in a quick and efficient manner. Surprisingly, to the best of my knowledge, this is the only study that has isolated the role of assessment modality in instructed L2 acquisition research.

In sum, the demands of assessment tasks can alter to different degrees the retrieval processes of target forms among adult L2 speakers. These demands can have varying effects on the cognitive resources that L2 speakers deploy during the execution of assessment tasks. Sanz’s (1997) findings further demonstrated that these effects occur even immediately after pedagogical interventions. As such, the effects of pedagogical interventions can be modulated by the modality of assessment tasks. This modulation has implications for assessing L2 learners’ proficiency levels in instructed settings. In this chapter, I extend this inquiry to a population of HL learners given that HL and L2 learners differ in their prior language experience. One explanation for the results in Sanz (1997) can also be related to L2 learners’ prior language experience with the L2. Arguably, in foreign language instructed contexts, L2 learners receive more exposure to written than aural input, which can lead to an imbalance in the strength of retrieving L2 linguistic knowledge according to mode. Therefore, L2 learners may have an advantage when completing written assessment tasks. Conversely, as argued above, adult HL learners typically enter the learning scenario with an oral production advantage in the HL. Therefore, potentially, having more automatized knowledge of the HL in the oral mode can ease HL learners’ cognitive burden, as they would be able to draw on more attentional and memory resources to retrieve form-meaning mappings. To examine this issue, I analyze data from task-based instruction with the same population of HL learners reported in a previous study (Torres 2018) but isolating here the role of assessment modality.

Task-Based Interventions with HL Learners

The subfield of instructed HL acquisition is still emerging, as more empirical studies are needed to answer questions about how HL learners respond to pedagogical interventions (Bowles 2018). Within the few studies published in this area, researchers have examined the effects of task-based instruction on HL learners’ language performance and development (e.g., Blake and Zyzik 2003; Kang 2010; Bowles 2011b; Bowles, Adams, and Toth 2014; Henshaw 2015; Torres 2018; Torres and Cung 2019). These studies have addressed the effects of task-based interaction patterns on learning opportunities (e.g., Bowles, Adams, and Toth 2014; Henshaw 2015) as well as focus on form techniques such as corrective feedback on task-based learning outcomes (e.g., Kang 2010; Torres 2018). To report on the patterns that we are observing from these task-based studies is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that the use of tasks has served as a window into how HL learners deploy their linguistic and cognitive resources during task-based pedagogical interventions. In this chapter, I adopt the definition of tasks as a workplan in which a communicative and purposeful context has been created that allows HL learners to make use of their linguistic resources (Ellis 2018). Following Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani (2014), tasks as a workplan ought to meet the following criteria: a primary focus on meaning, some kind of gap, a main reliance on learners’ own linguistic and nonlinguistic resources, and a nonli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Related Works
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why and How to Examine Outcomes of Heritage Language Instruction
• Part I: Morphosyntactic Outcomes
• Part II: Social and Educational Outcomes
• Afterword: Studying Outcomes to Bridge the Gap between Teaching and Learning
• List of Contributors
• Index