Despite the increasing number of U.S. born Latinos, placing heritage and native speakers in the Spanish curriculum is still a challenge (MacGregor-Mendoza & Moreno, 2020). The present article: (1) addresses the unique needs of heritage speakers in the Spanish curriculum; (2) problematizes traditional grammar-based placement exams; and (3)…

Our country, which is today the Dominican Republic, is a Spanish speaking country due to the historical and well known fact that the then Hispaniola Island or Santo Domingo was split into two different colonies by effect of the Aranjuez Treaty (1777), held between the two Colonial Metropolis of Spain and France thus establishing the French…

Foreign language enrollments in U.S. higher education are falling at an unprecedented rate since the 1980s. This mixed methods case study sought to investigate this phenomenon by examining the motivational and attitudinal profiles of 89 beginning-level learners of foreign languages (Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese) and the contextual factors…

Spanish is the most common language for which students pursue a minor or fulfill language requirements in higher education (e.g., Looney and Lusin 2018) in the United States. In this context, it is not uncommon to find second language (L2) learners and heritage speakers (HSs) of the language enrolled in the same classes. Regardless of the type of…

In this personal reflection, Sonia Nieto recounts the lessons she learned about language and literacy from learning to speak Spanish and then English; to reading and writing; and the impact of these lessons on her identity, teaching, research, and life; and, more broadly, on the fields of education and literacy.

The National Bilingual Programme was launched in order to promote English learning in Colombia. The failure of this programme and subsequent iterations is well-documented, and research has also examined some of its negative effects for different societal groups. However, a comprehensive study of the social justice implications of Colombia's…

Experts in the field have advocated for critical approaches to Spanish heritage language (HL) curricula in which learners' proficiency in the language varieties that they bring from their homes and communities is considered an asset and culturally valuable knowledge. The proposal described here focuses on the adoption of a programmatic…

Indigenous languages of Mexico have largely been excluded from formal education spaces. This ethnographic action research study highlights a context where "Diidxazá"/ Isthmus Zapotec, an Indigenous language of Oaxaca, has recently begun to be taught in higher education. We examine the ways that administrators, the teacher, and students…

Scholars in rhetoric and composition have questioned to what extent the field can be decolonial because of the gatekeeping role that writing plays in the university. This article examines the decolonial potential of implementing multilingual practices in first-year composition (fyc), enacting what Walter Mignolo calls "epistemic…

The topic of the internationalisation of academia has recently attracted attention from sociolinguists and language-policy scholars. In this paper, we compare two different universities from two contrasting contexts in Europe in order to find out more about their projected stance [Jaffe, A. (2009). Stance in a Corsican School: Institutional and…

The undisputed position of English as the "international language of science" has resulted in a push for its use in college science classrooms in non-English-dominant contexts worldwide. This study uses classroom observation and interviews to examine the use of Spanish and English in college science classrooms at a land-grant university…

The learning of prestigious international languages becomes a process fraught with tensions in multilingual settings. The process of internationalisation in many universities has led to the spread of English-medium instruction (EMI), which tends to raise linguistic debates particularly in the case of bilingual institutions. However, and despite a…

The key role of administrative staff in the implementation of specific institutional policies at university has often been ignored when analysing policies or attitudes related to higher education. Consequently, little is known about the administrative staff's attitudes and involvement relating to the processes of internationalisation and…

This is a qualitative interpretive study that explores the past and present experiences of heritage learners (HLs) of Mexican descent who were studying or had recently studied advanced Spanish in institutions of higher education. All of the participants had been exposed to Spanish in the home and began their studies in elementary or middle school…

This article reports on an extensive survey administered to advanced heritage language (HL) learners to examine their language behaviors, attitudes, and backgrounds. To date, there have been no detailed categorizations of advanced HL learners to guide classroom instruction and curriculum design. Thus the present study is a first attempt to fill…