This study analyzes linguistic ideologies and attitudes of Spanish high school teachers in Western Massachusetts towards Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). An open-answer survey was conducted to examine the reactions of teachers towards utterances produced with well-documented Puerto Rican Spanish features. In the state of Massachusetts, Puerto Ricans…

The present study explores Spanish-English speakers' attitudes toward bilingual discourse in the Upstate of South Carolina. Implementing a mixed methods approach, survey data and sociolinguistic interviews targeting bilinguals' attitudes toward English-origin nonce borrowings, loanshifts, and codeswitching were examined. Quantitative analyses…

Following several calls in recent scholarship for increased attention to the study of the Central American diaspora in the United States, this article offers readings of Honduran-born author Roberto Quesada's novels "Big Banana" (1999) and "Nunca entres por Miami" (2003). Written in New York City, where he has resided since…

In this article, "presentism"--bringing current events into the classroom to discuss historically rooted structural inequalities (Spratt and Draxler 2019)--is examined as a pedagogical tool in the context of a service-learning class in which students participate with different Latinx partnerships. During COVID-19, this service-learning…

The present study examines the lack of representation of minority communities in the existing literature by examining the representation of Afro-Latinxs in texts and visuals in seven Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) textbooks, and the ideologies behind these representations. Drawing upon Norman Fairclough's (1995) model for conducting Critical…

This essay posits that an institution's program design mandates the curriculum for the classes we teach and that curriculum affects the concept of "canonical" literature, teacher preparation, textbook content, and comfort with discussing difference in the second language classroom for undergraduates. For that reason, this essay argues…

In a highly global world, migrant communities navigate multiple cultural and linguistic contexts. To understand these cross-cultural ties and bridge the fields of linguistics and transnationalism, the present study provides detailed linguistic analysis of the interrelation between heritage language use and symbolic transnationalism among the…

In 1996, Ernest L. Boyer's "The Scholarship of Engagement" ignited a national conversation with its call for greater dialectical exchange between "academic and civic cultures." In 2001, Washington and Lee University (W&L) Professor Ellen Mayock founded the student organization English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL),…

Employing a modified version of an exhibit template for course integration (Beckman 2012), Sylvia López designed museum projects for an elective Spanish course on health that is open to students at the high-intermediate level and above. The course's aims are manifold: to build students' vocabulary, to discuss cultural aspects affecting health, and…

Studies on the application of service-learning with an emphasis on heritage learners are still emerging. Using a critical service-learning approach, I describe how the integration of a service-learning project showed heritage learners of Spanish the need for people with their bilingual abilities. Specifically, I examine the impact of…

This essay provides a concise historical overview of US Latino/a literature from the 1960s into the twenty-first century. By tracing the evolution from its origins in small presses to major publishing houses in the United States, this literary tradition shifts from its regional and local portrayals of the Latino experience in the United States to…

In response to the rising need for Spanish-English interpreters in the United States, there has been an increase in translation and interpreting and Spanish for the health professions courses in Spanish language programs (Martínez 2015). However, before Spanish students are exposed to a clinic or hospital context, they may have limited experience…

Service-learning (SL), as a pedagogy that promotes reciprocal partnership building between campus and community through meaningful service and critical reflection, can provide language students with not only valuable language and cultural immersion experience, but also civic learning opportunities. Although SL research has revealed numerous…

2020 ushered in the convergence of multiple societal, political, environmental, and health crises. Racial reckoning collided with fearmongering on a national scale and punitive policies targeted non-citizens simultaneous to the global health pandemic COVID-19. COVID-19 required the unexpected pivoting from in-person instruction to what was, for…

By 2060, the United States population will be nearly 30% Hispanic, making Hispanism vital to students' engagement with the full breadth of their own societal fabric (Colby and Ortman 2015: 9). To replace current "reductionist" valuations of foreign language (FL) study as the depositor of career-enhancing skills, we argue for a four-year…