Stancetaking and heritage language production: the untold stories of spoken Spanish among third-generation “receptive” bilinguals

ABSTRACT

This article extends two conversations in the heritage language (HL) scholarship: 1) the need to strengthen the linguistic self-confidence among receptive bilinguals (who are typically associated with beginning-level HL students); 2) the need for more critical explorations of receptive bilinguals’ self-reported, albeit minimal, spoken Spanish in non-educational settings. This study approaches the relationship between linguistic self-confidence and spoken Spanish by examining the metalanguaging small stories of third-generation Mexican-American adults who do not identify as Spanish speakers, although they have studied Spanish formally and do claim strong comprehension skills. This case study of productive Spanish among “receptive” bilinguals specifically addresses the meta-sociolinguistic stances that study consultants take toward their bilingualism in stories that depict their current engagement with Spanish as adults. Findings indicate that the consultants, in navigating the research interview context, view nonparticipation and strong comprehension as the normative characteristics of their Spanish abilities. However, in other narrated contexts, they resource power and agency from their other social roles to position themselves as ideologically authentic Spanish speakers, though these interactions are unpredictable and infrequent in their emergence. Pedagogical implications for accentuating receptive bilinguals’ positive experiences speaking Spanish and for scrutinizing moments when they are reluctant to speak are addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Spanish in the United States
• Heritage Language Learning
• Receptive Bilingualism
• Small Stories
• Stancetaking

Acknowledgments

A special thank you to Catherine Stafford for the invaluable feedback on previous drafts and encouraging mentorship throughout the publication process. This article would not have been possible without the guidance of Caroline Vickers who supervised the original study design and data collection at California State University, San Bernardino. I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their expertise and helpful suggestions that contributed to a much stronger article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2017 meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics, which was supported by the UW-Madison Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition, with funding from the Language Institute; I would like to thank the audience for their interest and questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Two consultants self-identified as English-Spanish bilingual, and their inclination to code-switch and narratives of regular, sustained Spanish use supported this self-identification. The fact that two of the ten participants self-identify as bilingual aligns with Rumbaut et al. (2006) finding that just 17% of 3G Mexican Americans surveyed in Southern California reported to speak Spanish fluently.

2. Turn numbers to which the analysis refers are parenthesized. Bolded utterances/turns are those especially significant for the present analysis.

3. As with all other names in this paper, this name is a pseudonym.