Four waves of Cuban immigrants have arrived to the United States from the early 1960s with the fourth wave still in progress. The changing reasons these immigrants fled Cuba have resulted in diverse characteristics for each wave of immigration. This qualitative study investigated Cuban American students' perceptions of their cultural background…

Previous research has proposed a crucial role for critical experiences in language learning to better understand how learners understand and discursively construct their self-concept (Mercer, 2011, 2016; Serafini, 2020a; Thompson, 2020). However, studies have mainly explored critical experiences in the narratives of foreign language learners of…

This study investigated multiple learning motivation aspects of Chinese university students in Macau majoring in Spanish and Portuguese. A mixed methods research was employed by using questionnaires and interviews. 181 learners (96 Portuguese and 85 Spanish majors) were surveyed about ten language-learning motivation dimensions by using a…

This paper presents a study on the use of learning strategies in foreign languages, and more specifically Spanish. The study was conducted with 376 Chinese and American students who were studying Spanish in their countries of origin. The results obtained from a latent class cluster analysis identified five groups of participants based on the…

Framed within Ruiz's language-as-resource orientation, this article uses data from a college ESL classroom where a translanguaging approach was used for the teaching of a novel. After defining key terms, the article describes the linguistic context of higher education in Puerto Rico and its influence on one instructor's Basic English course. Using…

The purpose of this narrative study was to explore how Latina cultural brokers understand their role in translating and interpreting complex, adult situations for their families, called cultural brokering, and how that background shapes their collegiate experiences. While much of the higher education literature in recent years has focused on the…

Examines conversational arguing style of three groups of language learners: students from a Hispanic background (G1); those who lived for a year in a Hispanic country (G2); and those who were in contact with the language only as part of their tertiary-level education (G3). Findings reveal that G1 and G2 students exhibited a similar argumentative…

Two hundred nine Puerto Rican students in East Coast colleges, from mixed bilingual backgrounds, were administered four matched pairs of deductive reasoning tests in Spanish and English. Measures of reading comprehension in these two languages were also collected. Results indicated that performance on logical reasoning tests in each language can…

This study represents a first effort to identify sociocultural background variables that predict the successful mastery of a heritage language by adult learners. While there are well-documented sociocultural models for other second language learners, thus far there are no similar published models for heritage language learners. We focused on…

The levels of acculturation of biracial and monoracial Hispanics were examined in college students to determine the level of family or community influence in defining racial identification for the biracial individual. The sample was composed of Hispanic undergraduate students currently enrolled at the University of Kansas. Survey packets were…

This paper addresses beginning level Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners' attitudes towards their language and culture. Heritage language (HL) programs and research have often overlooked beginning level learners, especially within university settings. The current study involved 20 participants from a beginning level SHL class in the…