Setting the stage: TBLT and instructed heritage language learners

• Melissa Bowles, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign & NHLRC

In this talk I will set the stage for the panel, beginning with an overview of what task-based language teaching is (and is not) and explaining why TBLT is an appropriate framework to investigate how heritage learners engage, interact, and learn in a classroom environment. I will then provide a brief summary of TBLT studies that have been conducted with instructed heritage learners, with a view to showing how the papers in the panel move the field forward by providing new insights and help us better understand the ins and outs of classroom IHLA.

Task-Based Language Teaching and Arabic

• Noha Elsakka, Ph.D., Florida International University
• Melissa Baralt, Ph.D., Florida International University

Arabic is the official language of 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa that form the Arab League. It is also the fastest-growing language in the U.S., and the 8th most commonly taught world language in U.S. universities. Teaching Arabic is a unique challenge given its status as a diglossia in society. The Foreign Service Institute has also categorized Arabic as a Category IV language, “requiring over 2200 hours of instruction.” Albeit the growing need for Arabic proficiency, there is a dearth of research on the most effective pedagogic strategies to teach Arabic. In this talk, we present on the outcome of a rigorous needs analysis study that was conducted utilizing a mixed-methods approach with multiple sources (e.g., students, teachers, diplomats, job descriptions) and methods (e.g. interviews, surveys, class observations; Elsakka, 2023). A total of 64 pedagogic tasks, sequenced and organized thematically into 15 target task types, were derived. We report on how the curriculum was designed to accommodate heritage learners’ needs in relation to the teaching of Standard Arabic (SA) alongside Colloquial Arabic (QA), with examples of tasks for both.

Heritage language writing and the role of motivational beliefs

• Janire Zalbidea, Ph.D., Temple University

This presentation will discuss the importance of considering heritage language learners’ motivational beliefs to better understand individual differences in heritage language writing processes and outcomes. It will report on a research project investigating how Spanish heritage learners’ motivational beliefs about the importance, interest, and utility of writing in their heritage language relates to their actual writing performance across diverse sociopragmatic contexts. Participants in the study were university-level heritage learners of Spanish who performed two persuasive writing tasks (the Email to Friend and Letter to Dean tasks), completed two Spanish proficiency tests (in the oral/aural and written modalities), and responded to a series of questionnaires. Their writing performance was analyzed for a wide range of linguistic complexity indices. Results suggest that a stronger intrinsic interest in heritage language writing (i.e., ascribing greater personal meaning and significance to writing in the heritage language) is positively linked to heritage learners’ writing outcomes. In contrast, a stronger belief in writing in the heritage language as a tool for gaining linguistic and cognitive benefits (e.g., writing for expanding one’s vocabulary in the heritage language) is negatively associated with writing outcomes, regardless of one’s proficiency level in the language. In light of these and prior research findings, the presentation will discuss how teachers can help foster helpful motivational dispositions among students and promote positive engagement towards heritage language writing.

Metacognitive Instruction and Task Engagement during Korean Heritage Learners’ Task-based Peer Interactions

• Youngsun Moon, University of California, Irvine
• Julio Torres, Ph.D., University of California, Irvine

This ongoing study investigates whether metacognitive instruction on providing peer feedback facilitates task engagement and heritage and second language learners’ task-based peer interactions. To address this issue, the current study is gathering data from Korean heritage and second language learners enrolled in mixed intermediate and advanced Korean courses. For the asynchronous session, participants completed an elicited imitation task in Korean and the Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire to gauge proficiency and language dominance, respectively. During the synchronous session, participants worked in pairs to complete a Samsung decision-making/writing task through Zoom. Participants were instructed that they were hired as business consultants for the company, Samsung, to lay off one of their employees due to financial hardship from the company. Each pair saw six employee profiles and needed to reach a consensus on the employee they wanted to lay off. Then, the pair composed a formal email to the CEO of the company justifying their recommendation. Each pair was randomly assigned to +/- metacognitive instruction conditions. Those in the metacognitive instruction condition saw a short video on providing feedback to their peers during interaction prior to the completion of the Samsung task. After task completion, all participants completed a questionnaire to measure their engagement during the task and a subset of participants completed a semi-structured interview to gather additional data on their engagement during task execution. We expect the findings to provide implications regarding providing metacognitive instruction for peer interactions and feedback while completing a task-based writing assignment with a relatively understudied population, adult Korean heritage and second language learners.

Linguistic Landscape as a Critical Task in Community-Based Heritage and Mixed Spanish Courses

• Ellen Serafini, Ph.D., George Mason University

In recent years, there has been growing attention from language scholars and practitioners to the meaningful and potentially powerful synergies between Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP) (Crookes & Ziegler, 2021; da Silva, 2020; da Silva, Farias, & Souza, 2018; Farias & da Silva, 2021; Ellis, 2021; Serafini, 2022, Forthcoming; Torres, 2023). Both in the Brazilian and U.S. contexts, this strand of research has developed the notion of critical task as a means of promoting and measuring learners’ critical language awareness (CLA). In the field of U.S. Spanish heritage language education., CLA has evolved to encompass students’ awareness of sociolinguistic concepts such as language contact, variation, and change, language ideologies, and relationships between language and identity with an “…understanding of how language is imbued with social meaning and power relations” (Leeman, 2018, p. 345). CLA also implies students’ agency to make their own linguistic choices using the languages and language varieties at their disposal and to resist, if they choose, language discrimination and linguistic and social hierarchies (Leeman & Serafini, 2016).

In this presentation, I will discuss the design and implementation of (digital) linguistic landscape (LL) as a critical task-based pedagogical practice and outcome intended to build and assess advanced heritage and second language Spanish students’ CLA in the context of a Spanish for Social Services community-based course. While LL has mainly been used as a source of authentic language input, exposure to new vocabulary, and to raise metalinguistic awareness (Landry & Bourhies, 1997), it is used here as a pedagogical tool to promote students’ ability to examine relationships between language and power and analyze the ethnolinguistic vitality and the symbolic and social functions of languages used within healthcare and social service contexts. I provide concrete examples of students’ developing CLA based on their final LL projects and highlight implications and possibilities for critical TBLT across diverse learning and social contexts.

References