Challenging the Monolingual Status Quo: Heritage Speakers and the Future of Spanish in the United States

Abstract

Challenging the Monolingual Status Quo:Heritage Speakers and the Future of Spanish in the United States Catherine Fountain Keywords bilingualism/bilingüismo, heritage language learners/estudiantes de lenguas de herencia, language policy/política de lengua, Spanish for native speakers/español para hablantes de español, Spanish in the United States/español en Estados Unidos In "A Cross-Generational Conversation about the Future of Teaching Spanish," Angélica Lozano-Alonso discusses a number of topics relevant to the future of our profession, but at the heart of the essay is the growing presence and importance of heritage speakers in Spanish classrooms. As we consider the future of Spanish teaching in the United States, we should also consider how the presence of native and heritage speakers provides world language teachers an opportunity to challenge the status quo of monolingualism in this country with examples of successful and dynamic bilingualism. Like Angélica Lozano-Alonso, I grew up hearing Spanish at home, though in my case it was from only one parent. As one of the few children not from a monolingual English-speaking family in my North Carolina community in the 1980s, I was reluctant to use Spanish or even acknowledge what I knew outside of my home. I remember feeling mortified when my mother spoke to me in Spanish at an event at my elementary school. At parties or events with other Hispanic and Spanish-speaking families I had a set answer to the question, "¿Hablas español?"—"Solo un poquito." Only as an adult trying to raise my own sons as bilingual have I come to fully appreciate my mother's persistence in speaking to me and my sister in Spanish, and only as an adult have I come to understand how my childhood reactions fit into the broader picture of language attitudes and language policies in the United States. When I moved back to North Carolina from California in 2006, I found a much larger and more vibrant Hispanic community than the one I knew growing up. Mirroring the rest of the country, more and more North Carolina colleges and high schools have Spanish courses designed for heritage speakers, and non-Hispanic students often have opportunities to use Spanish at work or with friends. Yet at the very same time, also mirroring nationwide trends, language programs are being cut at all levels across the state. In the public school system my children attend, which used to have a K–8 Spanish program, students now cannot even opt to take a language until high school. This disconnect tells us much about attitudes towards language and towards multilingualism in the United States. In a sketch from his monologue Dress to Kill (2002), comedian Eddie Izzard pokes fun at similar attitudes towards bilingualism in Great Britain: "Two languages in one head?" he quips, "No one can live at that speed! Good lord, man, you're asking the impossible." Indeed, even as article after article is published touting the benefits of bilingualism, in much of [End Page 220] the English-speaking world monolingualism is viewed as the norm while bilingualism is seen as either an exotic talent or a source of suspicion. As language teachers, we have long been at the forefront of movements that push back against this view. As Spanish teachers in the twenty-first century, we have a unique opportunity to show our students—both heritage speakers and more traditional L2 learners—that bilingual individuals and communities can exist and thrive in the United States. To do this, we must first and foremost support and encourage heritage speakers to take pride in their linguistic abilities. This may mean recognizing and affirming ways of speaking that are common to Spanish in the United States but traditionally seen as "incorrect" or non-standard, including forms like haiga or fuistes, and accepting that code-switching is a common practice in bilingual communities. While we want to help all students use formal, more standard language in writing, and avoid interference from English, when we as Spanish teachers belittle bilingual students' ways of using of language we also inadvertently belittle their bilingualism itself, reinforcing an old stereotype that some Spanish-English bilinguals...