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THE TEACHING of Spanish to Spanish speakers as a field of study and as a focus for Spanish language teachers is over a quarter of a century old. A major impetus for addressing the needs of the native Spanish speaker was the Chicano civil rights movement. As scholars and activists began to explore the centrality of Spanish as an identity marker for Chicano and Latino communities, many Spanish language teaching professionals came to realize that their profession had participated in the oppression of Chicano students and their language. It is no coincidence that many of the scholars who have most influenced the teaching of Spanish to native Spanish speakers movement are themselves Chicanos and Latinos and native speakers of Spanish. Some of them, like their students, may have been ridiculed by their teachers, professors, or colleagues for speaking and studying stigmatized varieties of Spanish. Despite these experiences, or perhaps because of them, they challenged the academy to reconsider basic notions of language, learning, and curricula.
In this cluster of articles we honor Guadalupe Valdés, a scholar who has been influential in the teaching of Spanish to native Spanish speakers. She has also made important contributions to the study of bilingualism, code switching, language and gender, language teaching, language testing, and the relations between minority-language parents and the public schools. Valdés has consistently challenged scholars in these areas to broaden their perspectives by considering the very notion of bilingualism in all its complexity. As important as these contributions have been to academia, they have also been a vehicle for speaking out about injustices in the educational system, both in the academy and in the public schools. Those of us who have had the privilege of knowing Valdés have long admired her courage for embodying the ideals first put forth by Paulo Freire, that education is not neutral but is first and foremost a political act.
In this paper I discuss some aspects of the teaching of Spanish to the Spanish speaker from the perspective of an educator. My experience in bilingual education has shown me that while the field may be different ideally from teaching a heritage language as an academic subject, in practice they are often alike, both in goals and in pedagogy. Our students are very similar in backgrounds, language profiles, and needs. Furthermore, educational linguists and bilingual practitioners face many of the same issues their Spanish language teaching counterparts do. Specifically, we each struggle with how best to teach standard Spanish to speakers of other varieties and with how to provide students the accompanying literacy skills that are necessary in the academic context. The struggle comes from our efforts to strike a healthy balance between honoring these nonstandard varieties of Spanish and our need to expose our students to the larger Spanish-speaking world through the written medium and by necessity through the standard variety. By stressing the written form, however, we may find ourselves in an uncomfortable position. Our students' reasons for studying Spanish may not jibe with our professed goals. Below I examine this dilemma by reviewing the history of the teaching of Spanish to native Spanish speakers in the light of the experiences of bilingual students. Although bilingual educators and Spanish language teachers may see themselves as quite different from each other, I believe our students may perceive our classes as very similar.
The teaching of Spanish to Spanish speakers is one of the areas to which Valdés significantly contributed. She combined a new theoretical perspective and a concern for a group of students who had been marginalized by public educational institutions. To bring some cohesion to the field Valdés made several important points in a 1985 book she edited with Anthony Lozano and Rodolfo García-Moya. First, she reminded their readers that Spanish speakers in the Southwest were bilinguals, who by definition would always be different from monolinguals and would therefore reflect in some fashion their knowledge of their other language, English. Second, Valdés suggested that the teaching of Spanish to Spanish speakers should resemble the teaching of English language arts in the public schools as “an effective instrument of thought, expression and communication” (11). Third, Valdés underscored that rather than eradicate students' native dialects, teachers should help students become biloquial, able to use both their own Spanish varieties and the standard, in the appropriate settings. Fourth, she called for further theorizing in the field that would specifically explore how to teach a second dialect.
Over the next ten years there was tremendous growth in this area. Many universities established native Spanish-speaker tracks and prepared their university teaching assistants to teach native Spanish speakers. In public schools progress made in this area was spotty. Because of a lack of trained personnel and a lack of commitment by school administrators, few secondary schools were able to establish appropriate programs for native Spanish speakers.
Some schools with bilingual programs made concerted efforts to use Spanish as a language of instruction, and as an effective instrument of thought and expression. In those schools, children could learn subject matter in Spanish while developing age-appropriate language competencies in Spanish. For the most part, however, the Spanish language was and continues to be treated as a second-class, private language used between teachers and monolingual Spanish-speaking students until the children learn enough English to understand an all-English curriculum (Fillmore et al.; Skuttnab-Kangas; Benjamin). In these situations students rarely develop basic literacy skills or team basic concepts in their native tongue.
The reasons for the minimal use of Spanish in these programs are numerous and most go well beyond the scope of this discussion. One, however, is germane to the issues I consider here. Many bilingual teachers do not have the linguistic skills to teach subject matter, that is, math, history, science, and so on, at a level appropriate to the cognitive and linguistic needs of their students. For this reason some programs have opted to treat Spanish as an academic subject that students take for particular periods of their school week, much as it is taught in secondary schools. Many of the teachers hired into these programs are products of Spanish departments.
In 1995 Valdés called for an examination of the theoretical and pedagogical issues in teaching heritage languages as academic subjects in multilingual settings. She raised four fundamental questions. Who are our students? What goals do we have for our programs or classes? Are these goals achievable, given our students? And how do we teach these kinds of students, considering our particular goals?
Using the teaching of Spanish to Spanish speakers as a model, Valdés underscored the need to consider our students' bilingualism and the complexity of their linguistic profiles. In most cases, language competence is spread across two languages. Additionally, there may be great variation in students' abilities to use their two languages in different settings. Therefore she proposed four distinct but often overlapping goals common to Spanish-for-the-Spanish-speaker curricula: Spanish language maintenance, the acquisition of the prestige variety of Spanish, the expansion of bilingual range, and the transfer of literacy skills. For each goal Valdés raised questions that teachers and researchers must answer with our students' varied backgrounds and varying abilities in mind.
Some questions dealt with what it means to learn a second register. In many respects this is a central question in the field and it has yet to be answered. As a result many teachers teach Spanish to native speakers in much the same way they would teach it to second-language learners. In the examples I give below, I examine students' responses to this methodology. The issue of teaching a second register is closely related to the question of how literacy skills may be transferred from English to Spanish. Given our students'bilingualism, the mechanical reading and writing skills may be transferred in a fairly straightforward fashion; however, using the written form commonly requires that students use the prestige variety of Spanish. Does the introduction of the prestige variety affect bilingual students who may not speak it?
Other of Valdés's questions focus on the role of formal study of language in the efforts toward language revitalization and maintenance. Can we structure classrooms in such a way as to foster peer and community interactions? How can teachers promote expansion of the bilingual range and still contribute to students' positive attitudes about themselves and their Spanish? All of these questions are critical to our understanding of how best to teach our students.
Other recent work in this field includes a volume edited by Barbara Merino, Henry Trueba, and Fabian Samaniego, which is dedicated to the maintenance of Spanish by native Spanish speakers. The editors propose a model for the study of the maintenance and development of Spanish and of the students' home cultures as linguistic minorities. In the model they include macro and micro variables in the students'communities, the schools, and differences among individual students. Throughout the volume they stress the importance of the communities and the students' cultures, and they provide examples that incorporate students' language varieties and cultures as part of the methodology and curricula.
These contributions are important because they recognize the ties between students and their communities and they account for the sociocultural context in which students and teachers find themselves. Furthermore, they examine the influence of the school on students and their communities. However, having studied the schooling of language minority students from the students' own perspective, I have been struck by the omission of that perspective from the literature in this field. In setting our goals for the study of Spanish, it appears we have forgotten to ask our students about their goals and expectations for these classes. Specifically, what expectations do they hold?
I examine this question using two examples: one from my study of five fifth-grade mexicano bilinguals who attended a Spanish bilingual class twice a week for forty-five minutes and the other from my son's experience taking Spanish classes in high school.
The school that the five mexicano bilingual children attended was not formally designated as a bilingual school because most classroom teachers did not deliver bilingual instruction. Ninety-five percent of the children attending this school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, were Hispanic. Most of them were hispano - or nuevomexicanos , but at the time of the study about twenty-five percent of the Hispanics were recently arrived mexicanos . Many of the teachers in this school were nuevomexicanos and bilingual. However, only two classroom teachers in the school regularly taught part of their curriculum in Spanish. The rest of the teachers, including the fifth-grade teachers I observed, used Spanish privately and only with the monolingual Spanish speakers. The bilingual program in this school consisted of two Spanish language resource teachers who visited each classroom twice a week, providing Spanish language lessons to all of the children in each classroom. Both teachers spoke standard Spanish, although they were fully acquainted with and supportive of other varieties of Spanish. Their lessons consisted of assigning short written descriptions of some aspect of Hispanic culture, followed by comprehension questions, a short discussion, and writing practice. During the six months I was at this school, the focus was on early Spanish history, that is, the invasion of the Moors and the reconquista. At times the teachers would point out differences between the spoken variety the nuevomexicano children were familiar with and the standard, for example, ansina and así . Their message about these differences was that in conversation it was fine to use the local variety but that one needed to use the standard variety when writing.
The five bilingual children I studied were among the most proficient Spanish speakers in the class; however, they rarely participated during these Spanish sessions. Once I got to know them well, they confessed that they really did not like this class because as they put it, “Todo lo que hace tiene que ver con los españoles” (“Everything she presents is about the Spaniards”). When I asked them what they would like, they quickly replied that they wanted to study something Mexican. I should add here that the nuevomexicanos ' participation was about as lackluster as that of the mexicanos. While I never asked the nuevomexicanos what their feelings were, I would not have been surprised had they also desired a curriculum that reflected their culture.
My second example is that of my son, whose first language was Spanish but who like many bilinguals was schooled almost exclusively in English. He attended a private high school where he had few bilingual classmates. Because his speaking abilities were far more advanced than those of most of his classmates, he was able to progress to an advanced Spanish class in his junior year. The class dealt with Hispanic writers, and it was designed much like a university literature class. A typical lesson would consist of a written selection, discussion, and student writing on a particular theme or style. As the year began, my son was excited because at last he would be able to study something meaningful in Spanish class. Later that fall, he returned from school very upset, threatening to drop the class. Through a prolonged discussion, I discovered that he was completely disillusioned with the class. The focus on themes and literary style seemed totally pointless to him, foreign. What he wanted, he said, was information he could relate to, something about the history of Mexico or at least about the writers' lives and times.
In both examples children were following a curriculum very similar to the ones in Spanish language classes at the university. Through reading, discussion, and written practice the students would master basic literacy skills. At the same time, they would understand and differentiate between the varieties of Spanish they might speak and the standard variety. Furthermore, they would come to know the history and achievements of the Spanish-speaking peoples.
The teachers in each example were similar in background to their bilingual students. They were themselves circumstantial bilinguals who were aware and supportive of nonstandard varieties of Spanish. However, these similarities and their sociolinguistic knowledge did not seem to affect their practice. While the classes might each have had very different goals, their methodology and curricula were remarkably similar. They focused on literacy, but a literacy structured and constrained by academic notions of literacy genres. The readings, discussions, and writing assignments did not reflect the students' concerns. The children were not free to express their thoughts and communicate about what mattered most to them. Spanish in those classes ceased to be “an effective instrument of thought, expression, and communication.” The result was an artificiality in communication that stifled the potential for creativity and real language growth.
The children sensed the artificiality. They knew that the way their classes were designed prevented them from finding what they sought—a closer connection to their culture, their identity, themselves, as they defined these things. Their goals were immediate: to use their native tongue to explore who they were. Their teachers'goals seemed more long-term: to prepare the children with basic literacy skills and knowledge for future studies in Spanish. To that end they were trying to provide their students with a broader pan-Hispanic identity.
The differences in goals between the children and their teachers were not irreconcilable. The students certainly could have developed an appreciation for the broader Spanish-speaking world once their identities were more firmly established. Language and culture are bound together (Fishman). Children must be allowed to explore their identities through the medium that is itself an expression of culture (Merino, Trueba, and Samaniego; Skuttnab-Kangas). Most children begin that exploration in early adolescence, and continue it on into adulthood. For minority children the process can be particularly difficult since they must find their place in both the majority and the minority worlds (Sue and Sue; McAdoo and McAdoo). Because bilingual education and Spanish for the Spanish speaker programs represent the children's language, they also represent the children's cultures (Merino, Trueba, and Samaniego). And children will look to these programs for guidance and confirmation of who they are and who they might become. Therefore we who teach in or design these programs have an important responsibility to ensure that the programs meet the more immediate needs of our students regarding their identity development.
The two examples above are not isolated incidents. I have heard similar complaints from some of my university students and from children in other settings and from other language backgrounds. These complaints underscore the need to look carefully at our students and, as Valdés has suggested, to set our goals carefully. Perhaps we should add a fifth question to Valdés's, namely: What are our students' goals? By asking and answering this question we may come closer to finding better methods of helping our students express themselves more effectively in Spanish.
If we truly wish to reconceptualize the teaching of heritage languages, then we must include our students' perspectives. Without those perspectives we may continue to believe that we are leading our students in a particular direction, only to find that we have no followers.
The author is Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education and ESL in the College of Education at the University of New Mexico. This article is based on her presentation at a session honoring Guadalupe Valdés at the 1996 MLA convention in Washington, DC.
Benjamin, R. “The Functions of Spanish in the School Lives of Mexicano Bilingual Children.” Bilingual Research Journal 20 (1996): 135–64.
Fillmore, Lily, Paul Ammon, Barry McLaughlin, Mary Sue Ammon, and Michael Strong. Learning English through Bilingual Education . Washington: Natl. Inst. of Educ., 1985.
Fishman, Joshua. “Language and Ethnicity.” Language, Ethnicity, and Intergroup Relations . Ed. H. Giles. New York: Academic, 1977. 15–57.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed . New York: Continuum, 1970.
McAdoo, Harriete, and John McAdoo. Black Children . Newbury Park: Sage, 1985.
Merino, Barbara, J., Henry Trueba, and Fabian Samaniego. Language and Culture: Teaching Spanish to the Native Spanish-Speaker . Philadelphia: Falmer, 1995.
Skuttnab-Kangas, Tove. “Multilingualism and the Education of Language Minority Children.” Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle . Ed. Skuttnab-Kangas and James Cummins. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1988. 9–44.
Sue, Derald, and David Sue. Counseling the Culturally Different: Theory and Practice . New York: Wiley, 1981.
Valdés, Guadalupe. “The Teaching of Minority Languages as Academic Subjects: Pedagogical and Theoretical Challenges.” Modern Language Journal 79 (1995): 299–328.
Valdés, Guadalupe, Anthony Lozano, and Rodolfo García-Moya. Teaching Spanish to the Hispanic Bilingual: Issues, Aims, and Methods. New York: Teachers Coll. P, 1985.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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