A growing body of work exploring transnational interaction has brought to light the importance of awareness of multilingualism in research contexts, yet little consideration has been given to researchers working in a later learned language (LX) or the process of investigating linguistically diverse communities. This research takes place within a…

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the perception of unstressed vowel reduction (UVR)--also known as vowel devoicing--in Central Mexican Spanish. UVR is a variable, gradient process in which vowels undergo a constellation of phonetic weakening processes including shortening, devoicing, and apparent deletion (Gordon 1998). While it is…

Word Analysis is an approach to teach second language (L2) students about cultural perspectives which are understood collectively as the ideas, values, beliefs, and experiences many native speakers have regarding cultural domains within their own cultures. Word Analysis is anchored on the relationships between language and communication, and…

'Translanguaging' has become the most popular term in discussions about how to use learners' languages as resources for target language teaching/learning, but it has also become ambiguous because it is being developed in proposals adopting different perspectives on multilingualism. The first aim of this article is to offer an overview of the two…

This research investigated how a Critical Sociocultural Linguistics Literacy (CriSoLL) approach to authentic materials supports student literacy in a mixed Spanish heritage language (SHL) and additional language (L2) Spanish intermediate course at the university level. Using a qualitative approach (Cho, 2018; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021)…

Little is known about how monolingual ideologies and their effects manifest in online contexts as compared to offline contexts. We conducted a corpus-assisted discourse study to investigate this, with a focus on Twitter representations of Spanish as a heritage language in the USA. We analysed two corpora (one English and one Spanish--over 30…

Catalonia is an interesting site for language ideology research for several reasons. It is a multilingual and multicultural territory, where both Catalan and Spanish enjoy the status of co-official language. Adding to this, over the course of the last two decades there has been a growing movement that has called for the independence of Catalonia…

The aim of this commentary is to discuss and promote discussion on some linguistic and pedagogical issues around the use of gender inclusive language, particularly the -e morpheme in plural forms, in Spanish. Its speakers are experiencing and becoming aware of language change in real time concerning the use of morphosyntactic choices that seek…

World language study exposes students to more than just language; they are also exposed to different cultures. After graduating, students will be exposed to different languages and cultures in the workforce, and they must be prepared. Students often leave their language of choice after the one or two semester course requirement; it takes more than…

This sociophonetic study examines affricate variation through a continuous lens using diachronic data from Caracas Spanish. We investigate the relationship between frication and occlusion period duration in affricate segments across two steps. First, we present a phonetic characterization of the dependent variable and its variants. Second, we…

This paper analyzes data from Native American students' attainment in a first-semester Spanish language course at an indigenous-serving institution before, during, and after the pandemic. The gap between Native American and non-Native American students increased during the first post-pandemic semester to the point that just one out of 11 Native…

While considering Makoni and Pennycook's (2006) critique of the colonial nature of the notion of singular languages in this dissertation, a documentation and investigation of English and Spanish use on billboards in Carolina, Guaynabo, and San Juan, three cities in Puerto Rico, is presented. The billboards in these towns make use of Spanish, the…

This article examines the ways Latino/a bilingual teacher candidates (TCs) talk about their own and others' language practices and the ways this talk reflects and reproduces racialized notions of bilingualism. Drawing on data from a one-year critical ethnography at a Hispanic-serving institution in Southwest Texas, this article demonstrates that…

Although recent research suggests that gains are made in the acquisition of dialectal features during study abroad, the few studies that have been conducted on this topic in Spanish-speaking contexts have focused primarily on features characteristic of Spain. This article examines the L2 acquisition of phonological features characteristic of…

This study examines the second language (L2) development of variable /s/-weakening in the spontaneous speech of L2 learners of Spanish who studied abroad in either Dominican Republic, where /s/-weakening is widespread, or central Spain, where /s/-weakening is much less common. Learners' realizations of /s/ were coded impressionistically and…