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. Predicting facilitative processing of gender in Heritage Spanish using measures of lexical proficiency
- Zuzanna Fuchs, University of Southern California
- Emma Kealey, University of Southern California
- Esra Eldem, University of Southern California
- Leo Mermelstein, University of Southern California
- Linh Pham, University of Southern California
- Anna Runova, University of Southern California
- Seoyoon Hong, University of Southern California
- Mete Oguz, University of Southern California
- Yue Chen, University of Southern California
- Catherine Pan, University of Southern California
- JK Subramony, University of Southern California
Background: Previous research has shown that heritage speakers (HSs) can use grammatical cues to facilitate lexical processing during real-time language comprehension. For example, in Spanish, HSs can use the masculine article el that precedes the target noun to fixate more on a masculine object in a visual display when all other images are feminine. While HSs in aggregate show similar anticipatory behavior to late-bilingual comparison groups, within-group variation in this effect remains under-explored.
Aims: Building on previous work on HSs’ facilitative processing of gender and individual differences in language processing, the current study investigates the predictive power of three commonly used measures of lexical proficiency (picture naming, verbal fluency, LexTALE) with respect to individual differences in the facilitative processing of gender in Heritage Spanish.
Methods: HSs of Spanish (n = 52) residing in Los Angeles participated in an eye-tracking study combining the Visual World Paradigm with the Covered Box Paradigm. Displays showed three images, one of which was initially covered by a square and revealed after the onset of the target lexical item in the auditory prompt. Each participant saw 200 displays and was instructed to click on the target by an auditory prompt that contained an article agreeing with the target noun in gender and number. For analyses presented here, all targets were singular and the image covered by the box was a plural distractor. In the ‘same’ condition, the target and competitor were of the same gender; in the ‘different’ condition, they were of different genders. Two other experimental conditions pertaining to other research questions are not included in the present analysis.
Lexical proficiency: Participants completed three tasks measuring Spanish lexical proficiency: (1) oral picture-naming task, which measures recall of meaning (untimed, conducted before the eye-tracking task), (2) verbal fluency task, which measures recall of form and meaning (60s per category; viz. vegetables, clothing, musical instruments), and (3) LexTALE – a tool measuring the form recognition aspect of lexical proficiency (pen-and-paper task).
Results: For each participant and each trial, the average proportion of looks to the target from the onset of the article was calculated. Scores on each of the proficiency measures were converted to z-scores. Three linear models (one for each proficiency measure) were fitted predicting proportion of looks to the target by condition (same, different), proficiency measure, and their interaction, with random intercepts grouped by participant. The model testing the LexTALE proficiency measure found a significant effect of condition (β=0.028, SE=0.013, t=2.15, p=0.032) and LexTALE (β=0.039, SE=0.017, t=2.26, p=0.027); the interaction effect was not significant. Models testing the picture-naming and verbal-fluency measures each found significant effects of condition but not of the respective proficiency measure.
Implications: The main effect of condition replicates previous findings that HSs of Spanish demonstrate facilitative processing of gender. Results suggest that the LexTALE – a measure of receptive vocabulary – is a significant predictor of HSs’ within-group variation in this effect.
3. 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.
4. Maintenance and Shift among Chinese Heritage Speakers in Flanders
- Qiqi Huang, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Language sociological research in Belgium have 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 largely on Brussels (Guo & Vosters, 2022; Li et al., 2022; Li & Shen, 2024), 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 display strong heterogeneity as a result of the multiplicity of migration waves and diversity of geographic origins, socio-economic and educational background, and economic activity (Latham & Wu, 2014; Baldassar et al., 2015; Sarah, 2016). This reflects significant socio-economic changes that have shaped the linguistic practices of the Chinese diasporic community. In this context, this study aims to explore CHL maintenance and shift across generations, examining language repertoires and practices in the domains of education, family, and friendship.
Moreover, as heritage language studies often emphasize cosmopolitan urban settings due to migrants tending to settle in urban areas, sociolinguistic super-diversity has been less studied in less densely populated regions, which leaves a gap in understanding heritage language maintenance and shift in rural contexts. It is worthwhile to note that the Chinese community in Flanders is notably dispersed across the region, which allows for a unique investigation of CHL use across spatially diverse settings.
Through a sociolinguistic lens, this study employs a distributive quantitative approach to map the sociolinguistic profiles of Chinese immigrants in Flanders, based on an exploratory survey. It focuses on individuals with personal or familial ties to Mandarin or other Chinese languages, such as Cantonese, Hokkien, and Teochew. By addressing both urban and rural dynamics, this study contributes to a nuanced understanding of CHL maintenance and shift, advancing the broader field of heritage language research.
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.