Heritage Spanish Language Teaching and Maintenance as Acts of Resistance at the Midwest Modern Language Association Convention

November 9, 2017 - November 11, 2017

This panel will explore the intersection of applied linguistics, heritage Spanish language pedagogy, and language maintenance and revitalization efforts through the lens of resistance. Spanish in the United States is subject to the same pressures of three-generation-shift and loss (cf. Joshua Fishman 1972,1980) as other immigrant languages historically have been. Assimilation among Hispanophone families in the U.S. portends an extinction crisis in linguistic diversity in the U.S. Efforts to arrest Spanish language attrition may be interpreted as language activism. This panel seeks to address heritage Spanish language advocacy and the validation of linguistic attitudes around varieties of the language in the heritage classroom as acts of resistance. We are particularly interested in papers that explore heritage speaker identity in broader cultural contexts and as a tool for teaching, pedagogical texts or curricula that argue for heritage language study as a social movement, approaches to teaching variation and standardization in the heritage classroom, the role of the instructor in heritage language instruction and in society, the intersection of digital literacies and heritage Spanish for online instruction, the identity of the heritage language student as a member of a social phenomenon that actively resists language death, heritage language use among second-or third-generation Spanish speakers as a subversive act, and the role of social communities or networks in language maintenance efforts.
Please send proposals by April 15th to nathaniel.maddux@uwc.edu.