Language Ideologies in the Spanish Heritage Language Classroom: (Mis)alignment between Instructor and Students’ Beliefs

Abstract

Research on Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) has found that language ideologies have impacted SHL learners in the U.S. There are several ways in which language ideologies have influenced the overall experiences of SHL learners by encompassing power systems that are at play within personal, societal, academic, and professional contexts. Pedagogical proposals rooted in Critical Language Awareness (CLA) have been crucial in dismantling harmful language ideologies in the classroom, though there is still a lack of research focused on both students and their instructors. To investigate this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with four advanced university-level SHL students and their instructor in a CLA-oriented SHL program. We also examined the writing assignments of each student to triangulate our data and gain a better understanding of how the students’ language ideologies were being maintained and how their instructor engaged, or not, with students’ beliefs about language. Through directed content analysis, our findings indicate that students with more experience in the program deviate from relaying harmful language ideologies. Their instructor, while aware of students’ negative beliefs about language, conveyed mixed messages about these ideologies as well.

Keywords

• Spanish as a heritage language
• language ideologies
• critical pedagogy