Spanish as a Heritage Language

Introducción

Elena Foulis — 2025-07-02

Esta edición especial de la revista Spanish as a Heritage Language es una muestra de la ponencias, diálogos y reconocimiento del impacto de la investigación, pedagogía y las posibilidades de crear colaboraciones justas, éticas y culturalmente relevantes con las comunidades con las que trabajamos, incluyendo a nuestres estudiantes, colegues y el contexto local de donde provienen.

La multiliteracidad crítica en el aula de español como lengua de herencia

Alexandra Rodríguez Sabogal — 2025-07-02

Este artículo aborda las ventajas derivadas de la implementación del modelo de la multialfabetización o multiliteracidad crítica en el desarrollo curricular de la enseñanza del español como lengua de herencia. A partir de un repaso breve a la trayectoria de la pedagogía crítica en la educación superior y su influencia en la enseñanza del español como lengua de herencia en Estados Unidos, este artículo explica cómo los modelos de la conciencia lingüística crítica (Critical Language Awareness), el aprendizaje por diseño (Learning by Design) y la pedagogía para las multiliteracidades (Multiliteracies Pedagogy) se integran en la multiliteracidad crítica. Lo anterior se ejemplificará mediante el estudio de caso de un curso avanzado de español, diseñado e impartido en una universidad del sur de Texas. Este ejemplo evidencia no solo cómo la multiliteracidad crítica contribuye al logro de objetivos pedagógicos, tales como el desarrollo de habilidades lingüísticas, la promoción del pensamiento crítico, y el fomento de la responsabilidad personal y social en los estudiantes, sino que además, permite que los estudiantes de español como lengua de herencia se conviertan en productores de conocimiento sobre sus comunidades, capaces de crear y difundir sus propias narrativas corrigiendo y enriqueciendo bibliotecas y archivos sobre sus comunidades.

Sociolinguistics and Heritage Language Knowledge in High School Classrooms

Ana Sánchez-Muñoz — 2025-07-02

Understanding the sociolinguistic dimensions of heritage and minority languages has been shown to have positive effects on students’ ethnolinguistic identity, academic confidence, and development of social consciousness (Dee & Penner, 2017; Holguín Mendoza, 2022; Vásquez, 2006). However, most students do not encounter the sociocultural aspects of language until they attend university, and even then, only a small number are exposed to them (Carter & Sánchez-Muñoz, 2023). This En Acción piece argues that students can and should be exposed to sociolinguistic issues, particularly those issues concerning minority and heritage languages (HL), earlier in their education and describes a pedagogical model for doing so with high school students.

Foregrounding the Social Meanings Derived From Lived Experience

Whitney Chappell — 2025-07-02

In this paper, I investigate the qualitative evaluations of both Spanish-dominant Mexican and U.S.-born bilingual participants toward Mexican and U.S. Spanish, assessing the influence of lived experiences on how they perceive both varieties. More specifically, I employ the theoretical framework of biographical indexicality (Sharma, 2021) to explain how personal biography influences the way we hear the world. I conclude that the groups use Spanish for distinct contextual and stylistic purposes, and given these biographical differences, the varieties of Spanish come to adopt different social meanings for each group. For Mexicans who speak almost exclusively in Spanish, and for whom Spanish is the language of power, prestige, and social advancement, the language is more likely to be associated with status and institutional hierarchies, while, for U.S.-born speakers who use Spanish at home and English in most other contexts, Spanish is considered a language of interpersonal relationships with high value placed on communicative competence rather than academic perfection. I conclude that the participants’ contextualized use of Spanish (and their exposure to the ideologies embedded in those contexts) conditions the indexical social meanings linked to Spanish varieties. As they perceive and produce different types of Spanish, they recursively reflect and constitute the social world around them, relying on a lifetime of experiences to navigate existing and to create new social meanings specific to their sociolinguistic environments.

High School Spanish Heritage Language Learners’ Perceptions of their Writing Abilities

Andrea Czart — 2025-07-02

The state of Illinois is home to the fifth largest Spanish-speaking population in the United States. The state’s board of education includes Spanish heritage language (SHL) classes among its high school elective options, and 158 out of roughly 800 total public high schools in Illinois offer SHL classes (Potowski, 2020). These programs serve SHL learners from a variety of ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds and proficiency levels (Montrul, 2015). While research has explored English language and world language learner language ideologies and beliefs about their proficiency in the target language (Garrett, 2010), fewer studies have explored this topic among adolescent heritage language (HL) learners, particularly with regard to writing (Del Carpio & Ochoa, 2022; Magaña, 2021; Martínez, 2005). This article analyzes qualitative data from an open-ended questionnaire administered to a group of SHL
students attending a suburban public high school in Illinois (N = 29) focusing on their language ideologies and beliefs about their speaking, reading, and writing abilities. With particular attention to SHL literacy, we analyze how students express uncertainty, or hedge, about their writing abilities according to their perceived audience and genre of use. We conclude this article by offering implications for HL curricular design and teacher training.

Bienvenido o De Regreso a Casa

Lydia García — 2025-07-02

En este artículo se habla sobre cómo el Centro de Enseñanza Para Extranjeros (CEPE) de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) desarrolló un curso de español para un programa de inmersión enfocado a hablantes de herencia y/o hispanohablantes, quienes tienen la particularidad de contar con el programa de Acción Diferida para los llegados en la infancia (DACA)¹. Para su elaboración, se consideraron las metas de mantener el español, adquirir una variante prestigiosa, fomentar actitudes positivas hacia la lengua y cultura de herencia, y desarrollar la conciencia cultural. El objetivo principal de este curso es apoyar al hablante de herencia con DACA a su encuentro o reencuentro con el español y cultura de México, lengua y cultura heredada de sus padres.

Se presenta el tipo de curso seleccionado, la metodología pedagógica elegida, una secuencia didáctica y el tipo de evaluación adecuada para llegar a las metas mencionadas.

This article talks about how the Teaching Center for Foreigners (CEPE) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) developed a Spanish course for an immersion program focused on heritage speakers and/or Spanish speakers, who have the particularity to have the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In its preparation, the goals of maintaining Spanish, acquiring a prestigious variant, fostering positive attitudes toward the heritage language and culture, and developing cultural awareness were considered. The main objective of this course is to support the heritage speaker with DACA in their encounter or reunion with the Spanish and culture of Mexico, a language and culture inherited from their parents. The type of course selected, the chosen pedagogical methodology, a didactic sequence and the type of evaluation appropriate to reach the aforementioned goals are presented.

[1] DACA es una política migratoria. El 15 de junio de 2012, la secretaria de Seguridad Nacional de Estados Unidos anunció que ciertas personas que llegaron al país cuando eran niños y que cumplen con una serie de criterios podrían pedir la consideración de acción diferida durante un período de dos años, sujeto a renovación. Estas personas también tienen derecho a solicitar la autorización de empleo. La acción diferida es un uso de la discreción procesal para postergar la acción de remoción contra un individuo por un determinado periodo de tiempo.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Reconceptualizing an SHL Program in South Texas

Stephanie Gonzalez — 2025-07-02

The field of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) has grown significantly in the past two decades. However, SHL programs continue to face several challenges, such as low enrollment, limited resources and support, a shortage of formally trained instructors, and both curricular and programmatic obstacles. At a mid-sized institution in the US Southwest, a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and one of the few HSIs to achieve R1 status, a growing SHL Program is housed within the Modern Languages and Literatures (MLL) Department’s Spanish Program. THIS INSTITUTION has intermittently offered SHL courses since 1973, with some gaps between course offerings extending over a decade (Pino & Pino, 2000). Within the last five years, the Spanish Program has offered a few SHL sections of the first two courses in the sequence. An evaluation of these courses revealed that their methods and materials were more reflective of Second Language (L2) instruction rather than SHL approaches. Therefore, this article first discusses the initiatives taken over the past two years to reimagine the SHL Program, aligning it with both innovative and critical advancements in the SHL field and THIS INSTITUTION’s Strategic Plan, Seal of Excelencia, and status as a Hispanic Serving Research University. Second, we detail the development of a place-based Open Educational Resource (OER) that reflects the program’s recent changes. Finally, we highlight the successes and challenges encountered during the redesign of the SHL Program.

Testimoniando the Graduate Student Perspective

Maria Vielma — 2025-07-02

At the University of New Mexico (UNM), about 19.2% of undergraduate courses are taught by graduate teaching assistants (UGW 2021). Within UNM’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the majority of enrolled Spanish graduate students are instructors of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) undergraduate courses—a language retrieval course designed for students with cultural connections to the Spanish language. Oftentimes these graduate students may step into these roles with minimal teaching experience, and specifically, a lack of training in Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) methodologies. While there is extant literature on the CRT within classrooms, little research reflects on the unique experiences of graduate students who teach (Haynie & Spong, 2022). As instructors in introductory courses that can significantly influence undergraduate students’ lives and academic trajectories, learning to incorporate culturally responsive practices within their teaching is critical.

We reflect on our time as UNM graduate students as we entered the roles of SHL instructors and the lack of pedagogical and methodological preparation that would have better equipped us for teaching in SHL classrooms. This work centers our own testimonios, having gone through the process of self-learning, as a means of grounding our enseñanzas, or teaching moments, and consejos, or pieces of advice, so that we may provide a) a point of reference for graduate students in need of clarity surrounding how to incorporate CRT in their classrooms, and b) a call to action towards the incorporation of CRT methods in the initial and continuous training and development of SHL instructors.

“Me parece muy importante que este tipo de lecturas sean asignadas”

María Ciriza — 2025-07-02

This study examines an upper-level Spanish course at a university where domestic Latino students and international Latin American students are in the same class. The latter group is often unfamiliar with US Latino experiences, highlighting the need to bridge gaps between these student populations. The
curriculum integrates a narrative pedagogy in which contemporary Latino narratives—films, documentaries, novels, and short stories—facilitate reflection on Latino identities, interlatino dynamics, and the complexities faced by biracial and bi-ethnic individuals from a critical decolonial perspective. To assess the impact of this curriculum on students’ cross-cultural awareness, we analyze their reflections throughout the course. We employ a case-study methodology to focus on three students: (1) Ana, an international Latin American student who initially holds an essentialist perspective on Latinidad; (2) Gabriel, a Afro-Puerto Rican American student grappling with the legitimacy of his Latinidad; and (3) Rodrigo, a socially conservative international student with a US and Colombian background who initially
views the class as positioning him within the “oppressor” group. Over the semester, reflections reveal significant developments: Ana gains an intersectional understanding of Latino struggles; Gabriel embraces his hybrid identity; and Rodrigo develops empathy for US Latino communities and their activism. This study underscores the critical role of a narrative curriculum in courses in which international Latin American students and domestic Latino heritage speakers take Spanish classes together.

Necropolitical Language Oppression

Christian Faltis Faltis — 2025-07-02

Drawing on what Roche (2022) refers as the necropolitics of language oppression, this article explains how the ideologies of language (Faltis, 2022b) come into play to delegitimize the bilingual languaging practices of Spanish speakers in Laredo, a city of 250,000 residents, most of whom are bilingual,
and who use local Spanish along with English throughout their days. I write this article for global Spanish teachers, heritage Spanish teachers, and bilingual teachers, all of whom hold views about the value and intellectual worth of local Spanish used in bilingual communities. In this article, I use the terms necropolitics (Roche, 2022), soft linguistic terrorism (Mena, 2023), global and local languages (García, 2014) and introduce the term Espancano to describe local bilingual practices. The goal of the article is to provide readers with ideas and actions that can be used to identify and counter necropolitical language oppression especially along the borderlands, but also in Spanish and bilingual programs situated in other areas of the country, where Spanish and bilingual teachers may also unknowingly incentivize necropolitical language oppression by positioning global Spanish above local Spanish.

Spanish Heritage Learners Speak Out

Julia Oliver Rajan — 2025-07-02

This paper explores the potential of Flip, a dynamic video-based platform, in empowering Spanish heritage speakers to enhance their vocabulary acquisition and fluency. Thirteen heritage Spanish learners taking advanced Spanish at a university in the Midwest participated in this study. They created reflective video clips demonstrating Flip’s interactive language learning approach. It also features
the use of technology in heritage language education. The students showcased tangible progress in their linguistic skills through presentations and self-evaluations. The findings highlight Flip’s efficacy in the Spanish heritage classroom, fostering community while celebrating linguistic heritage.