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CRITICAL PEDAGOGY

Critical Pedagogy proposes that the main goal of education is to equip ourselves and our students with the knowledge and tools to develop the necessary critical consciousness to become engaged citizens and effect social transformation of oppressive structures and practices. (Freire. 1968; Giroux & McLaren, 1986)
It invites us to engage in a process of self-reflection in order to uncover and understand the role our practice might play in the reproduction of societal hegemonies.

CLA & RACIOLINGUISTICS

CLA - tool to understand the socially constructed nature of language, or rather, of language practices and their role in perpetuating systems of oppression
Raciolinguistics -Challenges the traditional separation of language and race; language as site where social inequalities are either reinforced or contested (Flores & Rosa, 2015)
Historically contingent nature of ideas of language and race that shape and normalize hegemonic structures

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MONOGLOSSIA- REIFIED LINGUISTIC HOMOGENEITY

Monoglossia privileges as normative a particular standard language variety over other linguistic varieties or dialects (Silverstein, 1996).

Dominant variety: formal education, media, government, and other institutions.

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CLA & HERITAGE LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION

Maria Luisa Parra (2016) [...] the ultimate role of heritage language instruction is to empower students´ ethnolinguistic identity as part of their lives in the United States and as part of their global citizenship.

LINGUISTIC RACIALIZATION OF HERITAGE LANGUAGE SPEAKERS

Monoglossic stance

“Heritage”

Deficit perspective

Native (=white) speaker

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LEVELS OF EMPOWERMENT- UNDOING MONOGLOSSIC MYTHS

Affective

Linguistic

Sociolinguistic

Critical Sociolinguistic

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AFFECTIVE

LEVELS OF EMPOWERMENT- UNDOING MONOGLOSSIC MYTHS

VALIDATING THEIR BILINGUAL IDENTITY*

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LEVELS OF EMPOWERMENT- UNDOING MONOGLOSSIC MYTHS

TRANSLANGUAGING: Spelling for bilinguals

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LEVELS OF EMPOWERMENT- UNDOING MONOGLOSSIC MYTHS

Me encanta cómo, en la primera clase, aprendimos los errores de ortografía que cometen los hablantes nativos.

MONOLANGUAGING

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- Accent marks, grammar, punctuation…

- Vocabulary

- Practice

A kinder/ more compassionate relationship with Spanish*
*Validating their bilingualism
New/renewed connection with heritage

EMPOWERING HLS ETHNOLINGUISTIC IDENTITY

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LEVELS OF EMPOWERMENT- UNDOING MONOGLOSSIC MYTHS

Languages in contact
borrowings, calques, code-switching
Varieties

DESCRIPTIVE SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Proyectos. Textbook. Difusión.

A conceptual framework (“a vocabulary”) to reframe their ethnolinguistic identity

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Not addressing structural inequalities

DESCRIPTIVE SOCIOLINGUISTICS

Conceptual Framework drawbacks

Celebratory - all different but equal

Appropriateness (whiteness) - power intact

Languages, dialects, registers… = discrete units

CLA/RACIOLINGUISTICS

LEVELS OF EMPOWERMENT- UNDOING MONOGLOSSIC MYTHS

https://keepcalms.com/p/keep-calm-and-habla-spanglish/

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CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK WITH A VOCABULARY TO REFRAME/ SHAPE OUR PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE IN WAYS THAT ARE MORE COHERENT WITH THE GOAL OF EMPOWERING HLS

EMPOWERING HL INSTRUCTION: CRITICAL SOCIOLINGUISTICS

LANGUAGES (Purity tests) VS COMMUNICATIVE REPERTOIRES

NATIVE SPEAKERS VS PROFICIENCY, ALLEGIANCE

COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

CROSSING

TRANSLANGUAGING

…

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PODCAST: EPISODIO 4 “Critical Sociolinguistics for HLS”

“I would teach children in school to value everybody´s way of speaking”

“I would teach a class of Dominican Spanish, can you imagine teaching people “¿Cómo tú tas?”

Having sociolinguistic awareness is an important first step, but not the last one. Thinking about your own experience and needs, what other steps would you take? Discuss this quotation by Virginia Zavala. How does it connect with your own conclusions?

Make sure to include examples from your own experience or others that you might be familiar with.

“What is the point of defending a language if nothing is done to upend the oppression and marginality of its speakers”

https://puntoedu.pucp.edu.pe/voces-pucp/desinventando-y-reinventando-la-diversidad-linguistica-y-cultural

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ETHICAL STANCE

Not guardians of languages

PRACTICES AND SPEAKERS

VALIDITY OF PARTICULAR GOALS (values)

EMPOWERING HL INSTRUCTION: CLA & RACIOLINGUISTICS

If our students walk into the class saying haiga and walk out saying haya, there has been, in my estimation, no value added. However, if they walk in saying haiga and walk out saying either haya or haiga and having the ability to defend their use of haiga if and when they see fit, then there has been value added. It is critical that we strive to allow students to develop this type of sociolinguistic sophistication in our endeavors as SHL educators. (Martínez, 2003)

ADDRESSES THE UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF POWER IN LANGUAGE*

LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL PRACTICE
RACE & LANGUAGE
CONSTRUCTED IN COMMUNICATION
SPEAKERS AS THE FOCUS
COMMUNICATION AND NEGOTIATION OF MEANING

To maintain Spanish*

To transfer literacy skills

To foster academic potential*

To acquire a prestigious variety**

To expand bilingual spectrum

To develop socio-cultural awareness

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ETHICAL STANCE

Not guardians of languages

PRACTICES AND SPEAKERS

What is a mistake?
What is a “false cognate”?

EMPOWERING HL INSTRUCTION: CLA & RACIOLINGUISTICS

ACTIVE LISTENERS

Multiglossic listeners

Proyectos. Textbook. Difusión.

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SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONS

HLS & Raciolinguistics - a deficit (native/white) perspective about their Spanish* (split identities, shame…)
If our goal is to empower HLS we need to:

Integrate critical tools and practices consistent with this goal such as:

Understanding the interplay of language, power and experience and how our conceptual frameworks mediate and shape our PP and our students´ experience
Equipping our students (and ourselves) with “a vocabulary” (conceptual frameworks) that can help them reframe their ethnolinguistic identities in empowering ways

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THANK YOU!

¡GRACIAS!

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aalberse, S. P. (2017). A language contact perspective on heritage languages in the classroom. Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education, 301-311. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-44694-3_51

Carreira, M., & Kagan, O. (2011). The results of the National heritage Language Survey: Implications for Teaching, curriculum design, and professional development. Foreign Language Annals, 44(1), 40-64. doi:10.1111/j.1944-9720.2010.01118.x

Del Valle, José. “The Politics of Normativity and Globalization: Which Spanish in the Classroom?” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 98, no. 1, 2014, pp. 358–372., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2014.12066.x.

García, O. (2022). La flauta y la lengua: la educación bilingüe en los Estados Unidos. Anuario De Glotopolítica. https://doi.org/https://glotopolitica.com/aglo5/garcia/

Leeman, J. (2018). Critical language awareness and Spanish as a heritage language. The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language, 345-358. doi:10.4324/9781315735139-22

Martínez, G. (2003). Classroom based dialect awareness in heritage language instruction: A critical applied linguistic approach. Heritage Language Journal, 1(1), 44–57. https://doi.org/10.46538/hlj.1.1.3

Parra, M.L. (2016). Critical Approaches to Heritage Language Instruction: How to Foster Students’ Critical Consciousness. In M. Fairclough y S. Beaudrie, S. (Eds.) Innovative Approaches in Heritage Language Teaching: From Research to Practice. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 166-190. Print.

Potowski, K., & Lynch, A. (2014). Perspectivas sobre la enseñanza del español a los hablantes de herencia en los Estados Unidos. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 1(2), 154-170. doi:10.1080/23247797.2014.970360

Potowski, Kim, and Naomi Lapidus Shin. Gramática Española: Variación Social. Routledge, 2019.

Pratt, Maria Louise (2019). Keynote at The 2nd Annual NYU Conference on Second Language Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning Beyond the Classroom. NYU

Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2), 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149

Valdés, G., & Parra, M. L. (2018). Towards the development of an analytical framework for examining goals and pedagogical approaches in teaching language to heritage speakers. The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language, 301-330. doi:10.4324/9781315735139-20

Zavala, V (2019) Justicia sociolingüística para los tiempos de hoy. Íkala, Revista De Lenguaje y Cultura, 24(2), 343–359. https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v24n02a09