Spanish Heritage Learners’ Emerging Literacy

Reviewed by: Spanish Heritage Learners’ Emerging Literacy: Empirical Research and Classroom Practice by Flavia Belpoliti and Encarna Bermejo Amălia Llombart-Huesca Belpoliti, Flavia, and Encarna Bermejo. Spanish Heritage Learners’ Emerging Literacy: Empirical Research and Classroom Practice. Routledge, 2020, pp. 205. ISBN 978-1-138-18213-4. Spanish Heritage Learners’ Emerging Literacy: Empirical Research and Classroom Practice provides the results of an empirical study on the writing abilities of beginner Spanish heritage language (SHL) learners. The study is a comprehensive analysis of a corpus of 200 essays produced by SHL learners placed at the lowest level of language proficiency by the “SHL Learners Credit-and-Placement Exam” at the University of Houston. The book is divided as follows: an introduction to the SHL field (chapter1), an analysis of each of the levels of writing proficiency in the corpus of the study (chapters 2–6), and concluding curricular and general considerations (chapters 7 and 8). The first chapter provides an overview of the issues that occupy the focus of SHL research and a thorough review of different definitions of SHL learners that account for both their heterogeneity and prototypical attributes. The chapter includes a general demographic background [End Page 515] of the Hispanic population in the United States, and of the population of this study (Texas and Houston). Chapter 2, devoted to orthography, begins with a rationale for the need to pay attention to this overlooked aspect of writing in SHL, and then presents a classification of misspellings used in the analysis. The classification is similar to other studies conducted before (e.g. substitution, omission, addition) but includes new variables, such as type (error vs. mistake), word length, and source (intra-linguistic vs. inter-linguistic). Chapter 3 is devoted to SHL learners’ knowledge of the Spanish verbal system. First, it reviews the literature on this population’s verbal system, as well as different theories that have been proposed to explain it—nature of input, attrition, and incomplete acquisition. After concisely describing the Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) systems of Spanish and English, the chapter presents the TAM knowledge of SHLs as found in the corpus. The results confirm some of the previous findings from experimental settings, such as a preference for periphrastic forms over simple ones and erosion of aspectual distinctions, among others. It adds information about an overlooked element of the verbal system—that of modal auxiliary verbs. The chapter also includes a measure of verbal complexity and a classification of verbs into their frequency bands. Chapter 4 looks at the sentence level. SHL’s grammars are commonly looked at from either a sociolinguistic perspective (language variation and change) or a psycholinguistic perspective (language competence and processing), and the authors propose the need of a third perspective: a pedagogical one that explains the HL learners’ productive competence in order to inform instructional practices. The authors analyze their corpus from a CAF (complexity-accuracy-fluency) approach, which has been extensively used in L2 literature and scarcely in HLL’s research. Chapter 5 explores the vocabulary used by SHL in the study’s corpus, an area that has received much less attention than grammar. The authors use several measures to analyze students’ lexical production, which fall under these three main categories: lexical richness, English contact, and academic vocabulary. Through these measures, not only we learn about what the lexical production of beginner SHLs looks like (e.g., the fact that their lexical density resembles that of the oral register, or that 90% of the words used are found within the 1,000 most frequent words), but also the connections between the lexical production and the students’ language experience (e.g., English as a dominant language, compartmentalization of use of the two languages). Chapter 6 analyzes discourse competence and emergent argumentative writing. The chapter reviews the existing literature on the topic, which includes the study of linguistic and discursive features, register and genre, rhetorical organization, writing strategies, the effect of instruction, and access to two distinct rhetorical traditions. The authors analyze the corpus texts using three main components widely used in the research of written discourse analysis: global structure; textual sequence, and discourse cohesion. The last two chapters serve as a conclusion. Chapter 7

Empirical research · Library science · Literacy · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Population · Sociology · Computer Science · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies