Spanish Speakers Semi- and Residually Native: After the Placement Test Is over

Abstract

The sociolinguistic realities of a varyingly bilingual international metropolitan area such as El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua are complex,1 and this complexity is inevitably reflected in the linguistic profiles of students enrolling in Spanish courses at a large (ca. 15,000), essentially open-admission and overwhelmingly commuter-student institution such as the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), whose enrollment patterns (ca. 55% Mexican-American or Mexican, 4% Black, about 37% U.S.-educated other, and the rest variously non-hispanophone foreign) approach north-of-the-border population percentages (about two-thirds of El Paso's residents are Hispanic), and which actively recruits in Mexico. Since 1972, the UTEP Department of Languages and Linguistics' four lower-division (Frosh and Sophomore) Spanish courses have been divided into two tracks, one for Native Speakers and the other for Non-Native Speakers. I encircle these designators in quotes to reflect the area's sociolinguistic realities, which can only be described in terms of a continuum ranging from total monolingualism in English to total monolingualism in Spanish and all points in between, though as is true of continuua, clusters can be found, the most noteworthy of which involve Mexican-Americans, typically prompted by circumstances to be bilingual in English and Spanish to a greater or lesser extent. In a best of all possible worlds, lower-division Spanish at UTEP would offer as many tracks as there were continuum clusters or archetypes of students.2 In the real world of scheduling problems, minimal textbook variety, ignorance or even hostility among staff and extra-departmental faculty, and widespread student antipathy or indifference toward a language requirement, even a twotrack system is a constant challenge to operate as conceived. While Klee and Rogers (1989) substantiate by surveying a wide variety of undergraduate programs across the nation what the profession has long intuited to be true, namely, that the placement problem mentioned most frequently by the respondents was that of false beginners, at UTEP th central concern is the native or near-native spe ker who seeks to enroll in Spanish One for Non-Natives (4101). A month after I ass med direction of Spanish placement in 1978, I estimated that about 40% of the students in my own section of 4101 were native or quasinative hispanophones; requests that other instructors of 4101 come up with their own estimates produced identical results. It goes without saying that such mixed classes characteristically produce two sets of attitudes: cynicism among natives or near-natives, who correctly assume they need never crack a book to get at least a B (and who thus learn nothing from the course), and high anxiety among the non-native or largely so who, in addition to experiencing all the fears of foreign language so carefully catalogued by Horwitz 1989 and elsewhere, must also frequently suffer the barely-concealed mirth of hispanophone peers. Since 1979, our department has been perfecting a Spanish placement system which as of this writing (July 1989) represents, we feel, the best we can devise. It works like this: no student is to be allowed to register for the first time for a college-level Spanish course without taking the placement test (a 100-item multiple-choice machine-gradable local instrument) or signing what we call a waiver, i.e., one of two sternly-worded documents which allow students to affirm that they do not speak Spanish at home or in the neighborhood and did not recently study it for two consecutive years or more in high school,3 or to affirm that though they speak Spanish at home/in neighborhood they have not acquired literacy skills in the language. Without exception, any student not qualified to sign a waiverand any student requesting a waiver must answer a series of questions about which more later -must take the Spanish placement test. In