From https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-teaching-spanish-to-college-students-who-know-it/
Maria Julia Rossi suggests six ways to teach college-level Spanish to heritage learners:
"1. Highlight all of the advantages of being heritage learners. Their pronunciation and speaking intuitions are usually unbeatable, as is their cultural competency. They understand what you say in Spanish from Day One!
"2. Honor the Spanish they have, without lying to them. (They are not stupid: They know when teachers are patronizing.) Understand that each language register serves a different purpose and is perfect for its context; these classes help expand the context in which Spanish can serve them.
"3. Discuss the idea of prestige, showing the ideological mechanisms that make it work. Social, historical and economic reasons that lie behind linguistic prestige illuminate how we feel about accents today.
"4. Show different kinds of Spanish in action. More often than not, students are surprised to encounter peer-reviewed articles in their fields in Spanish, and to find published short stories in Spanglish.
"5. Assign longer readings and more challenging writing activities. These students are used to reading lengthy texts for almost every class they take in English, and writing about those. Why assign the same students half-page articles or “true/false” and fill-in-the-blank activities, as so many textbooks for heritage learners do? Only to deny their interests (frequently imposing crystallized stereotypes) and their intelligence.
"6. Turn their attention to their peers, too. Help them recognize classmates as part of a community of peers rather than as a competitive environment in which they can lose."
Read the full article at https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-teaching-spanish-to-college-students-who-know-it/
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