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Translingual Competence and Other Novel Notions in Sociolinguistics for Heritage Language Education

Leeman and Serafini’s Sociolinguistics for Heritage Language Educators and Students: A Model for Critical Translingual Competence (2016, available here) pushes the envelope on traditional Heritage Language (HL) sociolinguistic notions that have dominated the field. Mainly, it criticizes the all-too common conceptualization of “expansionist” models for HL education, which seek to, logically, expand student’s linguistic repertoires so that they may adopt more “appropriate”, or “formal” registers in their HL (versus the “informal”—mostly oral—repertoires of the HL that they already bring into the classroom). Indeed, Leeman & Serafini highlight that appropriateness and formality are simply insufficient to understand language variation, and therefore, incomplete for the conceptualization of novel pedagogical models in HL education.

To move away from “expansionist” and “appropriateness” models, Leeman & Serafini examine several sociolinguistic notions which are relevant in the field of Heritage Language Education, providing a case for how these, when critically examined, have the potential to guide HL educators in developing pedagogical tasks that can help students reflect on their own experiences, ideologies and understanding of themselves as speakers of the heritage language—which the authors present as key for HL education. Here I will highlight two of these notions found in the article: language variation and language contact-related contact phenomena.

· Language variation: thanks to early studies in socially based language variation, we know that language changes (phonologically, lexically, syntactically, morphologically, pragmatically) according to variables such as geographical location, social class, sex (or sexual orientation), age, etc. However, as the authors bring to light, instead of explaining the ways in which language used by a certain group is different than that used by another group, current understandings in language variation highlight that social variation not only determines use, but that it also constructs and performs social identity. For example, a HL speaker of Honduran Spanish might use the pronoun “vos” to perform solidarity with other Central American Spanish-speakers or to mark ethnic boundaries with speakers of other backgrounds, and not simply because it is a feature used by young Hondurans of low socioeconomic status. In other words, the authors stress that a person’s membership in a social group or the contextual setting in which that speaker finds her/himself does not necessarily determine the way they speak, but rather, that linguistic variation reflects the speaker’ agency as she/he chooses among the many repertoires available with the intention of portraying particular identities. Here’s where this notion is important for HL education: HL students may use language to index hybrid cultural identities as they exist in simultaneously existing linguistic and cultural groups. As HL educators, then, we must move beyond pre-conceived notions on how an HL student speaks based on where s/he comes from, in order to begin considering why s/he might speak a certain way. Additionally, highlighting the agentive role of the individual in language use makes room for critical language awareness, and might make students curious about the dominant social hierarchies and ideologies that govern the too-often-taken-for-granted notion that nonstandard varieties are less superior or somehow incorrect (which is way too engrained in the minds of HL students—I see/hear it every quarter when I teach a new Spanish HL class!)

· Language contact-related phenomena: it comes at no surprise that HL speakers might portray language contact phenomena (calques, lexical borrowings, code-switching, grammar convergence, etc.), and for us linguists, it is even less surprising to learn that beyond these linguistic phenomena being “impure” or “random”, they are indeed natural and systematic. Further still, recent research has suggested replacing the term “code-switching”—which still focuses on bilingual speakers navigating two separate codes—with “translanguaging”. This new term conceptualizes a bilingual speaker as an individual able to use the discursive practices of any/all the languages s/he speaks at any point, allowing for a more agentive, flexible, creative and rich view of the bilingual speaker. (For more on translanguaging, check out García 2014 and Canagarajah 2013).

These re-examined sociolinguistic notions (and a few others—check out the article for further reference) have the potential to instill in HL students critical, translingual language competence; the goal of HL education according to the authors. But, (and I truly agree with this) it must begin with us, the educators—we must go beyond “expanding” students’ repertoires so that they adopt more “appropriate” registers and begin paying special attention to why they make the linguistic choices they do; we must pay attention to the innovations in their repertoires (beyond a “change in code”) in order to justly understand how to “teach” them a language that is already their own. (For ideas on how to implement some of these notions in the classroom, check out the last section in the article, “Promoting Critical Translingual Competence: Examples for the Classroom”).

Full article citation: Leeman, J. & Serafini, E. (2016). Sociolinguistics and heritage language education: A model for promoting critical translingual competence. In Marta Fairclough and Sara Beaudrie (Ed.s) Innovative Strategies for Heritage Language Teaching. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. 56-79.

 

About the Author:

Lina Reznicek-Parrado is a fourth year PhD student in the Spanish Linguistics Program. Her research focuses on academic language and literacy in Spanish as a Heritage Language.