Spanish Maintenance Research Articles

Fuzzy multicriteria evaluation and trends of asset management performance: A case study of Spanish buildings

Asset management has an increasingly important role in organisations, as it can affect productivity and cost effectiveness, the useful life of facilities, the quality of processes, compliance with standards and safety and environmental laws, and more recently, to ensure more sustainable operations and use of resources. However, despite its importance in the provision of services to users, the buildings sector is deficient in contributions in the literature that: a) use an objective multicriteria model, and those developed in a fuzzy environment are even rarer; b) analyse the evolution of asset management in a country over an extended period of time; c) use weightings for each factor analysed, taken from judgements provided by experts in the buildings sector; d) consider all the full data for the sector, rather than average values; e) analyse the buildings complete sector and according to the size of the building. This paper, therefore, sets out a fuzzy multicriteria model for analysing the evolution of the asset management performance of the buildings sector by size (small, medium and large) in Spain from 2000 to 2020. The weightings of criteria and sub-criteria will be calculated based on the judgements of four experts in Spanish maintenance. 229 surveys carried out by the Spanish Maintenance Association are used, looking at all the information provided, rather than average values, developing discrete probability distribution functions to allow the uncertainty of the historical evolution of the asset management of buildings in Spain to be calculated. The average utility variation over the period 2000–2020 in the sector is 1.36 %. This value, although positive, is very low to cover a period of 20 years, and it seems that maintenance departments are not adapted to the new challenges of Industry 4.0.

Factors predicting secondary school language course enrollment and performance among U.S. heritage speakers of Spanish.

While a growing body of research indicates that Spanish language courses can promote Spanish maintenance and lead to overall improved educational outcomes among heritage speakers, there is little empirical or longitudinal evidence of factors that shape their enrollment in Spanish language courses at the secondary level. To address this issue, the current study takes a large-scale, longitudinal approach to investigate rates of enrollment in secondary school (6th-12th grade) Spanish and other non-English language courses, as well as factors that predict heritage speakers' enrollment and performance in non-English language courses. We analyzed subsample data from the Miami School Readiness Project (MSRP), a large-scale, longitudinal study consisting of 17,341 heritage speakers of Spanish (47% female, 95.4% Hispanic/Latino, 82.8% received free/reduced-price lunch, and 18.3% with a disability) who were followed from 4 years old until the end of high school. In general, Heritage speakers enrolled in Spanish language courses at a higher rate than other non-English language courses (52.2 and 25.3%, respectively). Enrollment patterns varied across different type of languages and grade level. Student-level factors including disability status, poverty status, early behavioral problems, and prior academic achievement significantly predicted students' enrollment in Spanish and performance in non-English language courses. Findings shed light on the long-term patterns of language study of this growing segment of the US school population with implications for future research and school policies that seek to improve heritage language learning and maintenance as well as equitable access to language education for language-minority students.

‘Qué barbaridad, son latinos y deberían saber español primero’: Language Ideology, Agency, and Heritage Language Insecurity across Immigrant Generations

AbstractThis case study examines the consequences of community language attitudes and ideologies on later-generation heritage speakers through qualitative sociolinguistic and discourse analysis of 22 interviews with first- and second-generation Latinos of diverse backgrounds in a major US metropolitan area. The findings show that imposed deficit identities derived from ideologies of language purity, proficiency, and individual agency were misunderstood and stigmatized later-generation heritage speakers, leading to language insecurity and avoidance despite overtly positive attitudes toward Spanish maintenance. Results demonstrate the resilience of prescriptive/purist language attitudes and the tension inherent between these beliefs (albeit couched within positive heritage language attitudes) and speakers’ actual bilingualism. Further, they show that the ideologies of individual agency can paradoxically contribute to the imposition of deficit sociolinguistic identities on later-generation speakers and curtail their language use. The study renders visible connections between ideologies of language, identity, and agency and demonstrates how their reproduction within families and communities circumscribes later-generation heritage speakers’ linguistic identities and behavior.

Vulnerability of Clitics and Articles to Bilingual Effects in Typically Developing Spanish-English Bilingual Children.

This study examines bilingual effects in Spanish-English bilingual children with good maintenance of the minority language. The present study compares the performance of a group of Spanish-monolingual children (MON; n=30) with two groups of Spanish-speaking bilingual children (Low English proficiency group: LEP; n=36; High English proficiency group, HEP; n=36) on the elicited productions of Spanish articles and object clitics. Our results suggest that children with LEP performed significantly lower than MON children of the same age on both articles and clitics in Spanish. However, children with HEP, who were a year older on average, performed similarly to the MON group. Both groups of bilingual children produced errors of clitic omission and substitution, but these errors were minimal in the MON group. The results suggest that Spanish clitics and articles are vulnerable to bilingual effects for English/Spanish speaking children with good Spanish maintenance.

‘Spanish at home, English at school’: how perceptions of bilingualism shape family language policies among Spanish-speaking parents of preschoolers

ABSTRACT In the United States nearly one third of children under five live in homes where a non-English language is spoken. However, many of these language-minority (LM) children shift towards English monolingualism after beginning school in early childhood. While language input and usage are central to acquisition and maintenance in each language, less is known about parents’ perceptions of bilingualism and how perceptions inform parents’ actions to support their child's bilingual development in early childhood. By applying a family language policy framework to data from 14 in-depth qualitative interviews, this study explores the beliefs and practices of Spanish-speaking mothers of preschoolers in a small northeastern US city. Thematic analyses revealed that mothers viewed Spanish maintenance alongside English acquisition as essential for economic opportunity and family communication, yet differed in their perceptions of how bilingualism was best supported. Some implemented a Spanish-only-at-home policy, delegating their child's English development to the school setting. Others avoided setting rigid boundaries, instead employing various discourse strategies to motivate their child's active Spanish use at home and seeking out school-based supports. Social pressures on the child, incomplete knowledge of local bilingual programs, and the current political climate countered mothers’ efforts to support their child's emergent bilingualism.

Asymmetries in the Maintenance Performance of Spanish Industries before and after the Recession

Abstract: Until the last few decades, maintenance has not been considered of special importance by organisations. Thus, the number of studies that assess maintenance performance in a country is still very small, despite the relevance this area has to the level of national competitiveness. This article describes a multicriteria model integrating the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) with multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) to assess the maintenance performance of large, medium and small enterprises in Spain, before and after the recession, as well as the asymmetries in the state of maintenance between different activity sectors. The weightings are converted to utility functions which allow the final utility of an alternative to be calculated via a Multi-Attribute Utility Function. From the Spanish maintenance data for different industrial sectors in 2005 and 2010, 2400 discrete probability distributions have been produced. Finally, a Monte Carlo simulation is applied for the estimation of the uncertainty. The results show that the economic crisis experienced by Spain since 2008 has negatively affected the level of maintenance applied, rather than it being considered an area that could deliver cost reductions and improvements in productivity and quality to organisations.

Preschool language interventions for latino dual language learners with language disorders: what, in what language, and how.

About a quarter of young children in the United States are dual language learners. The large majority are Latino children who are exposed to Spanish in their homes. The language needs of Latino dual language preschoolers are different from the needs of monolingual English-speaking children. As a group, they are likely to live in environments that put them at risk of delays in language development. This situation is direr for dual language preschoolers with language impairment. Recent findings from studies on interventions for Spanish-English preschoolers with language impairment suggest that a bilingual approach does not delay English vocabulary and oral language learning and promotes Spanish maintenance. Targets and strategies for different language domains are described. The effects of pullout versus push-in interventions for this population are preliminarily explored.

Maternal Perceptions of Agency in Intergenerational Transmission of Spanish: The case of Latinos in the U.S. Midwest

This article examines the ways in which a group of first-generation Latino immigrants to the U.S. Midwest conceptualized their role in their children’s bilingual development. Respondents were asked to identify the individuals or institutions on which their children’s language and academic development depended, as well as household practices perceived as conducive to Spanish maintenance, and perceived obstacles to their children’s use of Spanish in the domains of home, school, and community. Discussion centers on maternal perceptions of agency because of the centrality of the mother in intergenerational minority language transmission. It is argued here that immigrant mothers’ perceptions of agency are impacted by several factors. Among them: the experience of migration, the power imbalance created when their children are more fluent than the parents are in the majority language and culture, and finally, by the negotiation of ideological tensions between members of intra-community Latino networks of solidarity and the community at large.

Maternal attitudes toward Spanish transmission in the U.S. Midwest: a necessary but insufficient condition for success

This paper presents the results of an analysis of maternal attitudes toward intergenerational transmission of Spanish in a group of 19 first-generation Latino families in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska. A 12-item Likert scale was employed to survey respondent attitudes as part of a larger study on Spanish maintenance and loss in this Midwestern community. Attitudes toward transmission, perceptions about the viability of transmission in the context of the US, attitudes toward children’s bilingualism and perceptions about children’s development of Spanish as related to their cultural identity were surveyed. Overall results suggest that respondents held strong positive attitudes towards intergenerational transmission of Spanish. As a group, strong positive attitudes were recorded for 10 of the 12 items presented. The two items with the lowest overall scores were related to the belief that children may be confused or cognitively overburdened if exposed to more than one language.

Multicriteria model for maintenance benchmarking

Maintenance offers great scope for improvement in organizations because historically it has not been considered to have a significant effect on competitiveness. The use of benchmarking therefore would allow companies to identify aspects of maintenance functions which are susceptible of improvement when compared with other organizations. This article describes a multicriteria model constructed by a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP), utility functions and discrete probability distributions for the application of competitive and generic benchmarking in small and medium enterprises. The multicriteria model uses fuzzy AHP to assign weightings to the decision criteria and subcriteria in such a way as to include the ambiguities and uncertainties involved in the judgments of the decision makers. These weightings are converted into utility functions which will then allow the final utility of an alternative to be calculated via a multi-measure utility function. Using data from a survey carried out by the Spanish Maintenance Association, a series of discrete probability distributions were created from the appearance probability at each level of a descriptor in distinct industrial sectors. A Monte Carlo simulation was used to obtain a global maintenance assessment for each industrial sector and company, incorporating uncertainty into the results. The model described provides a global comparison of the state of maintenance in a company according to these criteria with respect to its sector and other sectors with better results. The model has been tested with a pharmaceutical company, a manufacturer of building materials and a sports center.

Contextual effects of bilingual programs on beginning reading.

This study of 1,338 Spanish-speaking 1st graders examined contextual effects of bilingual programs on reading comprehension and the effect of language of instruction within these contexts. The study included 128 classrooms in 32 schools located in border Texas and in urban Texas and California. These classrooms used either English immersion or Spanish maintenance bilingual programs. Detailed observations of teachers' instructional language were made, sampled within the year. The analyses allowed classroom-level differences to be separated from student-level differences, and for Spanish and English passage comprehension to be considered simultaneously. While mean differences between programs were reduced for English passage comprehension, maintenance programs still outperformed immersion programs in Spanish. Results also indicated large program and locale covariance differences at the classroom level, implying important differences in how these programs operate in these locales.

Spanish maintenance and loss in the U.S. Southwest

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The dynamics of Spanish maintenance and shift in Arizona

Within the discussion of the dynamics of Spanish language maintenance and shift to English in the southwestern U.S., this article takes a magnifying glass to one Southwest state in particular, Arizona, and the societal pressures that impact language maintenance and shift. Rather than focus on speakers’ language use across domains or attitudes about Spanish and English, this article examines the wider sociopolitical context of language use through the lens of ethnolinguistic vitality and subjective ethnolinguistic vitality, and from the perspective of the competing forces of language panic and language pride.

Language, Identity, and Cultural Awareness in Spanish-speaking Families

There exists a wealth of research in the areas of heritage languages in the United States. Over the last two decades, the rapidly growing work on Spanish, particularly, is making important strides in the understanding of this research area. Yet, there is only minimal work focusing specifically on language socialization and Spanish maintenance in Canada. In this article, I describe qualitative research examining the contextual factors of the linguistic socialization of Spanish-speaking families and their children in Vancouver, Canada. Analysis of the data indicates that cultural awareness and identity, familism, and home language practices are key factors that cut across a variety of aspects of first language maintenance, both as agents and outcomes. Il existe une riche base de recherche sur les apprenants de langues d'origine aux Etats-Unis. Lors des deux dernières décennies, des études sur l'espagnol en particulier, ont permis de grands progrès dans ce domaine d'étude. Néanmoins, le nombre de recherches examinant la situation canadienne vis-à-vis de la socialisation linguistique et le maintien de l'espagnol reste infime. Cet article rapporte les résultats d'une étude qualitative, laquelle examine les facteurs contextuels de la socialisation linguistique de familles et de leurs enfants de langue espagnole à Vancouver au Canada. L'analyse des données indique que la conscience culturelle et l'identité, le famillisme, et les habitudes linguistiques au foyer sont des facteurs critiques qui affectent une variété d'aspects du maintien de la langue maternelle, autant comme agents que comme conséquences.

Barriers to high-school completion among immigrant and later-generation Latinos in the USA

This article examines high-school completion among key Latino immigration groups in the USA, with a particular focus on the impacts of ethnicity, generation, language proficiencies, family structure and socioeconomic status. Family socioeconomic status has by far the largest impact on high-school completion. Poverty presents a persistent and daunting problem in high-school non-completion in the USA and is a primary contributor to Latino high-school non-completion. Addressing the issue of poverty is particularly important in the case of Mexicans, who make up the largest proportion of the immigrant population and whose levels of high-school completion are significantly lower than those of other groups. This research also highlights the impact of Spanish maintenance on high-school completion and indicates that high-level proficiency in both Spanish and English is associated with a greater likelihood to complete high school than Non-Hispanic whites when controlling for socioeconomic status and other variables. Ultimately, an important message of this research is that the impact of socioeconomic status on high-school completion — a primary mechanism for socioeconomic mobility across generations — must not be understated or overlooked by policymakers who aim to address social mobility across generations of immigrant groups in the USA.

The Latino Students' Attitudes, Perceptions, and Views on Bilingual Education

In light of the continuing debate surrounding bilingual education, there has been a renewed interest to examine the perceptions and views on the subject from various constituents. The purpose of this study was to examine the group who is the target of and most affected by this controversy—English language learners. The study surveyed 280 Latino students, all of whom were enrolled in bilingual classes, including Spanish maintenance and sheltered classes, in seven urban middle schools in Southern California, in regard to their attitudes, perceptions, and views on bilingual education. The study found that an overwhelming majority (90%) of the students surveyed believed that bilingual education was helpful to their educational experience and 86% supported the offering of bilingual education programs in public schools. Interestingly, however, if given a choice, 53% of the students responded that they would prefer to be in non-bilingual classes. Nevertheless, almost three-quarters (71%) of the subjects reported that bilingual education supported their cognitive and emotional development, suggesting the psychoaffective benefits beyond language development for English language learners.

Spanish Maintenance among English-Speaking Latino Youth: The Role of Individual and Social Characteristics

This paper investigates the effects of individual, family, social and demographic characteristics on the maintenance of Spanish among English-speaking Latino youth. This research finds effects of generation, gender, race, parent's English proficiency, single-parent status, parental income, and neighborhood concentration of co-ethnics as well as combined effects of race and gender on Spanish oral proficiency. The findings presented here suggest support for elements of the assimilation and the segmented assimilation theoretical perspectives as well as the race-gender experience theory. The author suggests that Spanish-speaking proficiency may be associated with opportunities to speak Spanish that are structured differently, not only by family and neighborhood contexts that allow for greater or lesser contact with Spanish, but also by gender and race.

Bilingual Education Students Reflect on Their Language Education: Reinventing a Classroom 10 Years Later

Ten years ago, an ethnographic study in a bilingual whole-language third-grade classroom identified conditions that defined the classroom as a learning community: a high level of intellectual expectation, symmetric power and trust relationships, authenticity, and additive bilingualism and biliteracy. The students' insights strengthened the authors' determination to advocate for authentic, holistic, and transformative language and literacy instruction. This article reports findings from follow-up interviews with those third graders, now young adults, who reflect on their experiences. A particular finding is the indication that nonschool contexts for language and literacy (e-mail, television, communication with friends and family in Mexico, and restaurant work) had more influence on these students' Spanish maintenance than did school contexts. This study compels us to renew the fight for bilingual education for all students beyond the point when English-language learners are deemed to have acquired sufficient English competence to participate in school. The voices of the four students and their parents that are reported here affirm for the authors the benefits of whole language theory and pedagogy, the critical value of bilingual education for all students (not just English-language learners), and the essential nature of fostering community in classrooms.

Different Beliefs

This article examines Spanish maintenance in a group of Hispanic teenagers in Sydney. In particular, it looks at the relationship between various attitude clusters and the development/maintenance of various aspects of proficiency. Both open and closed items were used, which permitted the emergence of unexpected attitude clusters. The proficiency measures examined a range of aspects of proficiency. Beliefs in favor of bilingualism and a determination to resist the hegemony of the dominant language are significantly related to proficiency, as well as the more familiar affect, pride, status and instrumental beliefs. Vitality beliefs concerning Spanish in the local community seem to be relatively unimportant. Clusters of beliefs are also found to be related to different aspects of proficiency.

Language as cultural practice: Mexicanos en el norte

Contents: A.C. Zentella, Foreword. Preface. Framing Our Agenda. Mexicanos in California and Texas. Language as Cultural Identification. Enacting Spanish Maintenance. Narrative Production Across the Bilingual Continuum. Doing School at Home. Language Socialization in Theory and Practice. Bilingualism in Time and Space.