|
Volume 1 Issue 1 (2003)
Latino Learners of Spanish: The Who, the Why and the What-for
Gustavo Mejía
Associate Professor of Spanish/Modern Languages
Central Connecticut State University
Abstract
This essay reflects on the growing number of Latino/a students
in higher education who are looking for ways to improve their competence in
the Spanish they learned at home, though they never studied the language in
an educational environment. The author offers a brief overview of various initiatives
and legal decisions that have affected the study of foreign languages in the
U.S., as well as observations drawn from his own experience as a foreign language
instructor. The author argues that language instruction for Heritage speakers
must meet the students’ needs on the academic, cultural, and political
levels.
When we think about the teaching of Spanish in the United States,
we normally have in mind English-speaking students who want to learn Spanish
as a second language. Indeed, in the majority of language departments, there
is nothing else. However, a relatively new and growing phenomenon is taking
place at the university level with the arrival of increasing numbers of Latino
students who are looking for ways to improve their competence in the language
they learned at home, though they never studied it. The purpose of this essay
is to reflect on this phenomenon and I hope to touch on some points that will
provoke some discussion. It seems necessary, however, to start speaking about
teaching Spanish to native speakers at college level by looking back to see
how this field has become what it is.
One of the first initiatives to teach Spanish to Spanish speakers in a
rather general way in the United States took place in Florida’s Dade
County in the early 1960s. The program was directed to Cuban children, and by
1970 it had been implemented in over 100 elementary, junior- and senior high
schools, involving some 120 native Spanish speaking teachers and serving more
than 15,000 students (AATSP 620-21). This program became the model for a
proposal by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese,
which, in 1970 commissioned a report that was published in Hispania in
1972. The report clearly stated that the Association would not continue to
“accept the embarrassing anomaly of a language policy for American
education which on the one hand seeks to encourage and develop competence in
Spanish among those for whom it is a second language, and on the other hand, by
open discouragement, neglect, and condescension, destroys it for those who speak
it as a mother tongue” (620). It therefore called for the establishment of
programs at all levels of schooling specially designed to “give the
learner full command of and literacy in world standard
Spanish” (620). As can easily be imagined, this report unleashed the
forces of nature and society alike and created quite a stir in the teaching
profession. Looking back, however, the importance of the report lies in the fact
that it delimited the arena on which the debate was to take place in the
following years, and many of the points of discussion that continue to emerge
today were effectively formulated —though not necessarily effectively
addressed— in that report.
Alongside academic developments, one must mention the struggles of the
civil rights movement, which obtained some landmark rulings, among which the
following are often mentioned:
- Serna v. Portales Municipal Schools. This ruling
upheld the plaintiffs’ claim that they had been unlawfully discriminated
against as a result of the defendant’s “educational program tailored
to educate a middle-class child from an English-speaking family without regard
for the educational needs of a child from an environment where Spanish is the
predominant language” (Piatt 3);
- Lau v. Nichols. Although this case
involved, not the Spanish language, but Chinese, this ruling established that
the plaintiffs had been deprived of rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1964
and ordered the “school systems to take remedial steps to rectify language
deficiency problems” (Piatt 4, also Lopez 3)
and
- Hernandez v. Erlenbusch, a case where
a Spanish speaker was granted the right to speak Spanish while having a beer at
a bar, as it linked language discrimination to racial
discrimination.
So by the mid 1970s, we
find that the right to use one’s own language had made its way into
American jurisdiction. Although not always (see García v. Gloor, Jara
v. Municipal Court, Guerrero v. Carleson) (Piatt 8-9), the courts were often
ruling in favor of the individual’s right to use his or her own language
in different situations. Often they granted a person’s right to bilingual
instruction and ordered the school systems to provide bilingual educational
programs. This situation began to rebut the so-far predominant policy embodied
in President Roosevelt’s widely quoted dictum: “We have room for but
one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that
the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not
as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house” (cit. Piatt 11).
At that time, however, most of the action was taking place in elementary
and secondary education, and although some universities, particularly those in
areas with a high concentration of Latino population, were beginning to offer
Spanish courses for native speakers, the issue had not become heated at the
college level. It was necessary to wait until the early 80s for the issue to
reach the universities, where the debate centered on a few pointed questions:
who were those students wanting to study Spanish? Why were they studying it? And
what should be the purpose of a university program addressed to them?
As for the first question, the answer was generally given in terms of
global statistics taken from the US Bureau of the Census, which indicated the
number of non-English speakers living in the United States, the areas where they
concentrated, and the major ancestral nationalities represented overall (Lopez
1-3). In some cases, a few comments were added to specify what each individual
professor encountered in his or her classroom, but no one was able to produce a
statistical analysis at the local level, not to mention state- or national
levels. Unfortunately, some twenty years later, one finds that the situation
continues to be very much the same. There is an appalling lack of data collected
from actual students who are studying the language, so we know very little about
them, and the little that we know about them is not supported by statistics, but
rather by the aggregate impression given by the few and isolated case studies
reported in the literature. Often they are referred to as having poor study
skills such as “listening, following directions, time management, task
accountability and rigorous self-discipline” (Feliciano 9, also Girard
Lozano 95). Their level of command of the Spanish language is described as
encompassing a wide range, from well-developed oral skills to comprehension
only, and there tends to be a consensus around their limited literacy in the
language. These students are described as being under “constant pressure
from English,” having “limited contact with educated speakers of
their native language, and feelings of inferiority about their own speech and
culture” (Parla 2).
As far as my own observations I the classroom, it seems that the
description presented above continues to hold true today in all but one point.
The problem of differing levels of proficiency in Spanish continues to exist and
tax the effectiveness of this type of program. The limitation in general study
skills has not been changed significantly, even though many of the current
students of Spanish at college level went through bilingual education at some
time in their schooling. What seems to have changed in the last few years is the
confidence they have developed about their language and the pride in their
culture. With Latinos about to become the largest minority in the country; with
the visibility that some Latino role models have acquired lately, and the
wide-ranging presence of the Spanish language in everyday life in America, these
students no longer feel under pressure from English and, on the contrary, feel
quite optimistic about their future, both as individuals and as a group. They
are proud of their heritage, aware of the improvement, and conscious of the many
possibilities that are now open to Latinos:
Yo siento que el futuro de los hispanos va a tener un efecto positivo
[sobre] todos los americanos [...] Si nosotros como hispanos hacemos nuestra
parte para promover los estudios en la universidad y también involucrarnos
a nosotros mismos en la comunidad donde vivimos, yo creo que el resultado puede
ser positivo.
El futuro de los hispanos en los EEUU se ve muy positivo. Los
hispanos hoy día se están preparando y estudiando más que
nunca. Los jóvenes están más motivados y más dedicados.
…nuestra gente latina tiene más oportunidades
que en [cualquier] otro tiempo. Yo, por ejemplo, nunca pensaba que podía
[llegar a] ser un maestro, pero ahora estoy feliz que voy a hacer muchos cambios
en la educación para la gente latina y la gente de mi comunidad.
En [poco] más de medio siglo los latinoamericanos han tenido
un gran impacto en la cultura y el pueblo americano. Uno lo que tiene que hacer
es [nada] más activar el televisor y puede ver el ambiente vivo y caliente
del sabor hispano. Es como si estuviéramos invadiendo el país:
el lenguaje, la comida, la música, las películas, la ropa [...].
Absolutamente todos los elementos de la cultura latinoamericana están
siendo asimilados.
(Quoted with permission from students’ papers. Names withheld by agreement).
As for the second question
—why were these students coming to study Spanish— the answers tended
to be two-fold: they wanted to learn Spanish in order to develop, recover or
reactivate their native tongue, on the one hand, and because they were aware of
the advantages that bilingualism could bring them in the job market (Aparicio
233). These different motivations for studying the language could, of course,
coexist in the same individual in varying degrees. These answers, however, were
not described on the basis of an empirical study of individuals studying the
language, but rather they were derived from theoretical studies, such as, for
example, W.E. Lambert’s, who defined two types of motivation for studying
a language: instrumental, if it reflected utilitarian values, such as
improving one’s position at work, or integrative, if it reflected
an orientation “to become a potential member of the other group”
(102). Lacking empirical data, the question about the students’ reasons
for studying Spanish continues to be posed and answered along the same lines. A
significant difference, however, is that those Latinos who are now studying at
university level today tend to perceive their opportunities in a more favorable
way than they did a decade ago. Their optimism about their future seems to be
based on the perceived opening of new opportunities in the job market and,
therefore, the instrumental motivation seems more grounded in a perceived social
reality.
Obviously, this perception is linked to the visibility that Latino
culture has taken in the last decade, a visibility epitomized in last
year’s [1999] Newsweek magazine’s front-page coverage of the
Latino community in the United States. Several commentators, however, have
questioned the nature of this supposed coming of age of the Latino community,
and one of them, Beatriz Pastor, points out that the social reality of most
Hispanics who live in this country continues to be defined by poverty,
illegality, discrimination, and inferior education, housing and medical
assistance, among other traits. She suggests that the image which we are being
sold “reafirma el modelo homogeneizador impuesto por el estado americano
al reducir la multiplicidad cultural, lingüística y económica
de esa comunidad a un sólo término: Hispanics.” Indeed, what
is at stake here is both the desirability and the possibility of an integration
of Latinos into mainstream America.
Perhaps the most difficult of the three questions —the one about
the purpose of a program to teach Spanish to native speakers—, it is also
the one that has the deepest implications both for curriculum development, and
in political terms. One should perhaps recall that before the 1970s, the
prevailing reaction of teachers who encountered an occasional native speaker in
their Spanish as a second language classes was to try to eradicate the native
speaker’s dialectal Spanish and turn him or her into a speaker of world
standard Spanish, the variety of Spanish that was normally taught to non-native
speakers. This attitude, which met not only with failure, but also with
frustration and humiliation by the native speakers, has been widely documented
(Valdes). Since the debate over this point started, however, the answers have
ranged between two extreme positions. As we have seen, the AATSP report was
clear in stating that such programs should ultimately “give the learner
full command of and literacy in world standard Spanish,” although it
suggested that this process should be done with care not to demean the
students’ own kind of Spanish (621). A middle-of-the-road position that
seems to have gained popularity is that of claiming biloquialism or
bi-dialectalism as the objective (Valdés). At the other extreme, however,
is the complete rejection of standard Spanish:
our primary rationale for learning and maintaining Spanish
is not so that it will serve as a link to Latin America, but so that it will
become a strengthening and reinforcing bond for chicanismo within our own
communities. Standard Spanish will not only detract us from this goal, it
will be an alienating factor. We cannot go into our communities to talk to
the people in standard Spanish and expect to effectively gain a feeling of
confianza and carnalismo. To do this naturally and effectively, we must use
the language of the people, our language [...] (cited in Lovas).
One other point has gained more
and more presence in today’s perspective on Latino learners of Spanish.
The language should lead to the study of the culture. It is not enough to be
bilingual; the real goal is to become bicultural. But, in spite of its clarity,
this observation is not free of controversy. Indeed, a number of questions and
problems arise when one starts to think about what Latino culture to teach, how
does Latino culture relate to Latin American and Spanish cultures, and above
all, when one questions whether the teaching of culture should aim at the
perpetuation of some of its most pervasive and conservative traits or whether it
should aim at the critical examination of Latino culture in order to change it
in positive ways.
In concluding these brief remarks, what becomes clear is that this is a
matter that will not be resolved in academic or scholastic terms, but rather in
purely political terms. What must be decided is what is or what should be the
social and political role of Latinos in the United States and what is or should
be the role of Spanish in their lives. Some may think that the purpose of such a
program is to help some of the more educated members of the community improve
their qualifications. This would in turn allow them to get better jobs in
international trade and banking so that they can successfully represent the
interest of American businesses and politics in the Spanish speaking world
outside the United States, and thus become part of mainstream America. From this
perspective, then, the goal of Spanish for native speakers programs should be to
help them become confident and educated speakers and writers of both their
native variety of Spanish and world standard Spanish. At the same time, these
programs could have the objective of helping them develop the study- and work
skills they have not learned in school. And as an ultimate goal, these programs
would help Latino students become confident and educated speakers and writers of
English as well, and thus be prepared to occupy the positions in international
trade and businesses that are now being taken by Latin Americans and by
second-language speakers. As Guadalupe Valdés puts it, “what we
must do instead is concentrate on what the Spanish-speaking student needs, on
what he doesn’t know in his own ‘dialect’ or in
standard Spanish. Very simply, we must teach him to read and write!”
(Spanish 1042). For others, however, the objective is to create agents of change
within the community who can go back to their people to build a grass roots
movement, and to reinforce communal bonds. For them, clearly, the objective
should be to develop their ability to speak their dialect. It must be noted,
however, that if one takes this position, one may find Spanish to be altogether
out of the landscape. In the words of Hernandez-Chavez, “The important
goal is the development of a community —educationally, economically,
socially, politically— through Spanish, through English, or
bilingually” (33). Language, then, becomes a negotiable
commodity.
Works Cited
American Association of
Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. “Teaching Spanish in School and
College to Native Speakers of Spanish.” Hispania 55 (1972):
619-31.
Aparicio, Frances R. “Teaching Spanish to the native Speaker
at College Level.” Hispania 66 (1983): 232-39.
Feliciano, Wilma. “The Spanish for Native Speakers Program at
State University New York at Albany”. ERIC (1980):
ED205028.
Girard Lozano, Anthony. “Teaching Standard versus
Non-Standard Spanish in a Study Abroad Program.” Social and Educational
Issues in Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Eds. Robert St Clair, Guadalupe
Valdés, and Jacob Ornstein-Galicia. Washington: University Press of
America, 1981. 93-100.
Hernández-Chávez, Eduardo. "Native Language
Loss and Its Implications for Revitalization of Spanish and Chicano Communities”
Latinos in the United States. Ed. Antoinette Sedillo López. New
York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995. 24-40.
Lambert, Wallace E. “A Social Psychology of
Bilingualism.” Journal of Social Issues 23 (1967):
91-109.
Lopez, Meliton. “Bilingual Education for Latinos.”
Bilingual Education and the Latino Student. Ed. Leonard A. Valverde.
Washington: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1978.
1-15.
Lovas, John C. “Language Planning in a Multilingual Community
in the U.S.” New Directions in Second Language Learning, Teaching and
Bilingual Education . Eds. Marina K. Burt and Heidi C. Dulay. Washington:
TESOL, 1975. 113-22.
Parla, JoAnn. “Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Teaching
Spanish to Bilingual Students.” ERIC (1983):
ED240841.
Pastor, Beatriz. “Hispánicos en USA: ¿Hacia
una nueva definición de comunidad?” On line document, 17 Nov. 1999.
http://www.elpais.es/p/d/debates/bro4.htm,
1 Feb 2000.
Piatt, Bill. “Toward Domestic Recognition of a Human Right to
Language.” Latinos in the United States . Ed. Antoinette Sedillo
López. NewYork: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995. 1-22.
Valdés, Guadalupe. “Spanish as a native
language.” Hispania 56 (1973): 1042.
------. “Language Development versus the Teaching of the
Standard Language” Social and Educational Issues in Bilingualism and
Biculturalism. Eds. Robert St Clair, Guadalupe Valdés, Jacob
Ornstein-Galicia. Washington: University Press of America, 1981. 46-62.
|
