Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad ed. by Rebecca Pozzi, Tracy Quan and Chelsea Escalante

Abstract

Reviewed by: Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad ed. by Rebecca Pozzi, Tracy Quan and Chelsea Escalante Guilherme Von Streber Pozzi, Rebecca, Tracy Quan, and Chelsea Escalante, editors. Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad. Routledge, 2021. Pp. 306. ISBN 9780367256890. Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad addresses an important and often-overlooked topic in language education and linguistics research: Study Abroad (SA) programs and Heritage Speakers (HS) of Spanish. The volume’s editors, Rebecca Pozzi, Tracy Quan, and Chelsea Escalante, share a background in Applied Linguistics and their research, published in noted journals and volumes by Routledge and Multilingual Matters, explores second and heritage language development, acquisition, and language pedagogy. This new edited volume presents studies of the mixed experiences that Spanish HSs go through during these international programs. The focus of the volume lies primarily in language development in the context of SA, yet identity, too, emerges as an equally important aspect that influences these students’ learning and lived experiences. The volume begins with an introduction by the editors that briefly situates the Spanish HS population within the context of SA while also providing an overview of the text. Then, it features five main sections: (1) sociolinguistic acquisition; (2) pragmatics; (3) identity; (4) linguistic development; and (5) program design. The volume has a total of thirteen chapters. All sections introduce any given subtopic with a review of literature. Due to the scarcity of materials, these frequently borrow from domestic Spanish HS language learning experiences and/or L2 study abroad, while often proposing convergence points between them. The volume concludes with an afterword by Christina Sanz that provides future directions for Spanish HS & SA research followed by a detailed topic index. In the first section, “Sociolinguistic Acquisition,” Geeslin and colleagues begin with a review of literature on sociolinguistic competence concerning SA while pointing out to future research paths on the subfield. Then, in “The Long-Term Impact of a Sojourn Abroad,” George and Salgado-Robles present a study on pronoun distinction that suggests that sustained contact with SA hosts increases participants long-term ability to accommodate pronoun choice according to their interlocutors. Next, Peace’s study “Aquí el español es muy diferente ” explores linguistic accommodation and points out that participants—who were of Mexican descent—increased lexical and phonological accommodation when interacting with Spaniard peers. Lastly, Escalante demonstrates in “Individual Differences in Dialectal Accommodation” that degree of linguistic convergence for accommodation highly varies from person to person, based on factors such as background and intrinsic motivations. The second section, “Pragmatics,” starts with Shively’s review of literature on pragmatics visà-vis SA. Based on L2 pragmatics literature, the author suggests that HSs who studied abroad show more pragmatic competence than their US-based HS peers. Moreover, in “The Pragmatic Development of Heritage Speakers of Spanish Studying Abradi in Argentina, ” the volume’s editors explore address pronoun choice variation in Mexican American HSs and their convergence towards use of the second person singular pronoun vos, used in Argentina. Their initial results indicate that HSs in SA do increase pragmatic competence after completing their programs abroad. In the third section, “Identity,” Leeman and Driver’s piece draws attention to a frequently overlooked aspect in SA design: the importance of developing critical awareness towards ideologies before and during SA experience. Next, Menard-Warwick, Kehoe, and Palmer’s piece “The Diverse Experiences of Heritage Speakers at a Guatemalan Language School” comprises a qualitative, interview-based study conducted during SA that focuses on identity construction of three participants. Particular attention is given to the tensions in how linguistic agency develops in the “contact zone” (160). The fourth section, “Linguistic Development,” begins with Escalante, Viera, and Patiño-Vega’s chapter reviewing the literature on development of oral and written abilities of L2 heritage language students abroad. The authors point to new research paths in corpus research, global [End Page 476] proficiency assessment, and methodologies for linguistic development among HSs in SA. Next, Marqués-Pascual reports on her longitudinal study “The Impact of SA on Spanish Heritage Learners’ Writing Development” that focused on 22 HLs during a semester or year abroad in Spain. The author concludes that participants significantly improved writing...