Saturday, June 14, 2025

Poster Session 2

1. Student, Instructor and Supervisor Stakeholders: Results from Piloting Spanish Materials for Texans/Tejanos

• Joshua Frank, University of Texas at Austin
• Daniel Molina, University of Texas at Austin

In the spring of 2024, a textbook survey was sent out to lower-division instructors at a large university in the Southwest. The survey collected quantitative and qualitative data along the variables of textbook adoption and textbook quality from both experienced instructors (defined as having taught a lower-division course in the department three or times) and inexperienced instructors (defined as having taught the course only one or two times). Results from (n=31) participants indicated that 11 out of 15 (73%) and 10 out of 16 (62%), experienced and inexperienced instructors respectively, believe the textbook only “partially meets” or “does not meet” expectations. There were several instructor concerns, including but not limited to the cost of the textbook, the user experience with the digital platform, audio exercises, the relevance of the cultural material, as well as the presentation and ordering of some grammatical material.

The results from this survey motivated the supervisor committee to review other available textbooks. A digital textbook called Trayectos rose to the top. It speaks to several of the aforementioned instructor concerns: It’s an OER (free to students, which amounts to $50k in savings per semester); online (homework) activities are embedded in the platform and are auto-graded; it seamlessly supports a flipped classroom model and a communicative-approach; and it’s a textbook made in Texas for Texans/tejanos. The next steps were to transfer the material to a leading platform for digital textbook publishing and to adapt and supplement the materials. We selected Pressbooks for the host of our adapted version. This not only ensures an excellent user experience but also allows the supervisor committee to edit and/or supplement material in real-time (i.e., instructors could provide feedback each and every semester and see results without delay).

The adapted materials (including the Pressbooks platform and new Canvas integrations) are currently being piloted with an April 2025 completion date. In addition, supervisors are developing supporting materials for instructors (e.g., lesson plans, supplemental slides, and homework recommendations). We are most excited about the impact these no-cost materials will have on our students. Each module introduces an El mundo tejano section, which culminates in a “My Spanish Texas” creative project. Students will present on the Spanish and bilingualism in their campus town, their hometown or family, and/or the border. The results of the pilot will be shared in addition to a framework for how this project is broadly applicable to Spanish language courses throughout the United States. These materials will be licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0.

2. Gender agreement and pronominal reference: a comparative analysis of heritage speaker, L2 and monolingual children of Spanish

• Brenda García Ortega, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Silvina Montrul, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Gender agreement in noun phrases has been found to be an area of difficulty and variability in school age bilingual children and L2 learners of Spanish in bilingual programs (Montrul & Potowski, 2007). Recent research has also provided evidence of direct object (DO) clitic gender variability in bilingual adults and child Heritage Speakers (HSs) of Spanish suggesting cross-linguistic influence from English (Goebel-Mahrle & Shin, 2020; Shin et al., 2019; Sánchez et al., 2022). However, there remains a gap in research analyzing gender agreement and pronominal reference in L2 children who both start the acquisition of Spanish later than the HSs and are dominant in English. In this study, we use computational tools to analyze speech samples from a corpus of 39 child heritage speakers, 16 child L2 learners and 22 monolingual Mexican children and investigate their accuracy in tracking pronominal referents while narrating a story. We further analyzed and compared their data to narration speech samples from 20 monolingual Mexican adults and 10 bilingual parents of HS children. Findings show that compared to monolingual children and both groups of adults, the HS and L2 children made significantly more gender agreement mismatches on noun phrases. Furthermore, all groups except the L2 children produced DO clitics. However, the HS children used DO clitics to reference inanimate nouns (la comida) more than the other groups, and produced many gender mismatches with feminine inanimate reference clitics (e.g. la comida ➔ lo). By contrast, the L2 children avoided the use of clitics altogether, choosing other strategies for reference, such as code-switching, which further demonstrates that gender agreement and clitic reference are very difficult to acquire for L2 learners (Sánchez et al., 2022), especially if their L1 lacks clitics and grammatical gender. In conclusion, even though their systems are different from monolingual norms, child heritage speakers have a substantially robust morphosyntactic representation of clitics and gender than L2 children because they learned Spanish since birth.

3. Maintenance and Shift among Chinese Heritage Speakers in Flanders

• Qiqi Huang, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Language sociological research in Belgium has predominantly focused on the dichotomy between the officially recognized majority languages—Dutch and French—while heritage languages, particularly Chinese as a heritage language (CHL), remain underexplored. Existing CHL research has centered mainly on Brussels (Guo & Vosters, 2020; Li et al., 2022; Li & Shen, 2023), Belgium’s most multilingual city, due to its official bilingualism (French and Dutch) and its status as a hub for international migration. In contrast, Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, has received far less scholarly attention as a migration destination for the Chinese diaspora. Chinese communities in Flanders exhibit strong heterogeneity due to the multiplicity of migration waves and the diversity of geographic origins, socio-economic and educational backgrounds, and economic activities (Latham & Wu, 2013; Baldassar et al., 2015; Braeye, 2016). This reflects significant socio-economic changes that have shaped the linguistic practices of the Chinese diasporic community. Through a sociolinguistic lens, this ongoing study aims to contribute to a nuanced understanding of CHL maintenance and shift by employing a distributive quantitative approach to map the sociolinguistic profiles of Chinese immigrants in Flanders based on an exploratory survey.

Selected References

4. The Mutual Intelligibility of Slavic Languages: The Case of Bilingual Goral Heritage Speakers in Slovakia

• Laura Jagelkova, Dartmouth College

For heritage speakers of less spoken Slavic languages, it is often difficult to find opportunities and motivation to maintain their heritage language. Knowing one of these Slavic languages can potentially give them the opportunity to understand others more easily, as previous research on native speakers shows. However, no rigorous research to date has examined the mutual intelligibility among Slavic heritage speakers and L2 speakers. I conduct such research which could, in comparison to results based on native speakers, be used to determine to what extent mutual intelligibility depends on the nature of the language itself rather than on personal attributes, cognitive skills or common cultural influences experienced by those who live in a given Slavic environment.

Moreover, existing studies of mutual intelligibility of Slavic native speakers do not sufficiently explore the impact of bi- or multilingualism on patterns of mutual intelligibility. To this end, I establish and compare mutual intelligibility patterns between Goral heritage speakers in the Slovak region of Orava, who learn the Slovak language in school, and speakers in the region of Malacky, where Slovak is the primary language of communication. Participants include approximately 200 adolescents between 13 and 15 years of age; examining participants of this age group allows me to obtain granular results with respect to proficiency in the language of instruction: the Slovak language. Participants complete an online survey including reading- and listening- comprehension tasks at three language levels (A1, A2, B1) according to the CEFR in Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, and Bulgarian. Comprehension of Slovak language tasks serves as a benchmark for the intelligibility of the other Slavic languages. The order of the languages is randomized in the survey to account for effects of fatigue, boredom, and learning. I designed the survey instrument such that I can separate the impact of multilingualism on measured mutual intelligibility from the impact of cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and imperfect attention to the survey.

Studying Goral heritage speakers is timely, as they were declared an ethnic minority in Slovakia in 2025. This allows them to study Goral as an optional language in schools in order to strengthen bilingualism in these communities. I am currently expanding this project to include heritage speakers and L2 speakers from the USA, Germany and France. This research can motivate Slavic heritage speakers to maintain their heritage language, facilitate communication between speakers of different Slavic languages, and improve teaching strategies for Slavic studies students who are required to learn more than one Slavic language.

5. Linguistic insecurities and ethnic identity development of Korean heritage language learners

• Haewon Kim, University of California, Santa Barbara

For many heritage language (HL) learners, connecting with family and (re)claiming ethnic identities are key motivations for learning their HL (Brown, 2009; Cho et al., 1997; Kondo-Brown, 2003; Yang, 2003). However, as students attempt to reconnect with HL in language courses offered at higher education institutions, they often become self-conscious of their language abilities, feeling that their language use is flawed and not fluent enough compared to standard varieties (Lippi-Green, 1997; Silverstein, 1996) or native-speaker norms (Cook, 1999; 2016). Research has shown that HL speakers tend to have low confidence in their HL use, describing their proficiency as ‘funny,’ ‘non-academic,’ and ‘child-like’ (Goble, 2016; Jo, 2001; Ortega, 2020). While much of the existing scholarship has documented these linguistic insecurities among Korean HL learners, less attention has been given to the underlying factors contributing to these perceptions. Recognizing that language learning is inherently political (Pennycook, 1990), impacted by racialization (Flores & Rosa, 2015), and shaped by inequitable power relations (Norton & Toohey, 2011), this study explores the socio- and raciolinguistic ideologies that impact Korean HL learners’ language learning experiences and confidence. Specifically, this study explores how racialized and marginalized language experiences across home, community, and classrooms contribute to learners’ negative self-evaluations of their HL proficiency.

Building on these concerns, this study aims to explore 1) the specific linguistic insecurities Korean HL learners experience and the factors contributing to them, and 2) how these linguistic insecurities affect their ethnic identity development. Toward this end, the present study plans to conduct in-depth interviews with 10 Korean HL learners enrolled in first- and second-year Korean language classes at a university based in California. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as an analytical framework, this study will unpack the power structures and ideologies embedded in language, particularly those that marginalize Korean HL learners’ linguistic practices. Additionally, I will critically examine the concept of ethnic identity through a poststructuralist lens, analyzing how its development is affected by learners’ linguistic insecurities. By highlighting the sociopolitical dimensions of language learning, this study aims to deepen how power operates within language learning. The findings will offer valuable pedagogical insights for language educators, fostering a more inclusive and critical approach to HL instruction that acknowledges the socio- and racialinguistic ideologies influencing learners’ experiences.