Elise Williams and Professor Ray Graham, TELL Department

The goal of this project was to begin to create a curriculum which will enable Spanish teachers to help heritage language speakers (those who grew up speaking Spanish in their homes) to develop academically in their native language (L1). The secondary goal of this project is to collect preliminary data to examine the effect of such a curriculum on Hispanic adolescents’ development of academic Spanish.

My task was to work with a class of twenty-five students, all considered “Heritage Speakers” in order to create part of a curriculum that would effectively allow them to learn and practice academic skills in Spanish. To do this, I worked with the class’s teacher and Dr. Graham to put together a unit which would address the topics of identity and relationships.

Two-fold instruction in the classroom

This project had two components: instruction three times a week which focused on higher-level academic skills for the students, and reading two times a week in which students worked in small groups with volunteers to improve their reading ability.

Students were assigned to reading groups according to reading ability, as assessed by the Fountas and Pinnel test. They were grouped with other students of similar ability in order to allow them to be guided through a text that was just beyond their ability; the instructor scaffolded them while reading to facilitate comprehension. In this way, students would be able to improve ther reading fluency and vocabulary through reading itself.

The tri-weekly instruction was my primary emphasis. I spent time in the classroom working with the students in a unit that focused on identity. The goal for that unit was to help the students focus on a) the grammar concept of description (adjectives), b) the social concept of identity and how personal identity helps shape behaviors, and c) composition of a descriptive essay. I used media to present the idea of Chicano identity and raise issues of racism, machismo, and behavior toward others within relationships. Students were expected to communicate only in Spanish, whether that communication be reading, writing, or speaking. Students were expected to write or orally give responses to provoking questions such as, “Would you want to be in a machista relationship? Why or why not?” and “How have you been affected by racism?” The students responded fully and well to questions that pertained to them.

Curriculum success and difficulty

The series of lessons that were created as a result of this project were successful in some ways and not successful in others. One notable success that I discovered in the classroom was the use of real-world topics to elicit enthusiastic response from the students in Spanish. For example, after watching a short clip of a movie in which machismo was displayed, the students were asked to respond, writing as much as they could in Spanish, to the question, “Would you want to be in a machista relationship? Why or why not?” Students were also told that they could write about an experience in which they had seen machismo at work. The students were very thoughtful, and most wrote quite a bit, and were willing to discuss their answers as well. From this, it was learned that students were far more likely to participate in academic tasks if those tasks (such as writing in essay format) focused on problems that they faced every day.

One factor that I had not considered is that the students were on many different levels, academically, to begin with. Their speaking abilities in Spanish ranged from being able to speak fluently to barely understanding, and their writing abilities ranged from complete illiteracy to being able to write well on an eighth-grade level. Because of this, the quality of responses, especially in writing, varied greatly. In addition, many students were reluctant to speak in Spanish because they were worried that they might not speak it well, or because they considered English to be the “better” language. This was one emotional block that was difficult to overcome.

Because of the varying levels of Spanish, it was difficult to assess how much the students learned from the unit. However, student engagement was high and production of language increased from what it had been before I came in to the classroom with material that the students were willing to focus on.

Conclusions and continuing development

This project is definitely one that must continue. Heritage language curriculum development is only beginning to come in to existence. Heritage language is a resource that has not been tapped and will not be able to be a resource unless it is cultivated. I am continuing the project I began by developing more units that can be applied to a Heritage language classroom, and also by adapting the unit that I did do for varying levels of ability in the language. I presented this information at the College of Education Mentored Research Conference, and was able to interest several there in the importance of this development.

Overall, this experience has been worth every bit of time invested. I developed my curriculum planning skills, created lessons and units that I can use in the future, and also gained a greater awareness of the influence student interest should have on my curriculum planning. As I began my student teaching, these lessons were very useful, because I was able to give the Heritage speakers in my Spanish classes’ assignments that were academically pertinent to them and allowed them to develop their own native language. I plan to continue to advocate for a solid curriculum for Heritage speakers by demonstrating to the faculty wherever I teach that it can be done, using the unit I created during this project.