3 Replies to “Look Who’s Helping Whom? Too: An Action Research Project (Avizia Long, Elizabeth Herring Dudek)”

  1. ¡Muchas gracias por la presentación! In this session of the NSSHL I’m seeing a lot of partnerships among institutions and also with HL/L2 groups and I think it is GREAT for our students! I have a question regarding the language requirement in the assignments. Was Spanish required or encouraged as the instrumental language? Do you think having a more translingual perspective would solve the perceived challenges of ‘use of English and ‘partner level in Spanish’? Thank you!

    1. ¡Hola! Beth Dudek here. I will respond based on my portion of the project. My students were the L2 students and were at a fairly basic level. The course was a conversation course disguised as a linguistics course, so one of the primary goals was to get more comfortable with oral expression in Spanish, and we used Spanishes of the US as our conversation topics. As such, my students were instructed to use entirely Spanish (fully knowing and allowing for that being very difficult and, at times, impossible for them). As a part of the course, we talked about translanguaging and they were told to expect that their Heritage-speaking partners likely would use some combination of English and Spanish. At the same time, my students were expected to hold themselves to a strict standard of Spanish-only if they wanted to improve their oral proficiency. After their partner conversations, our in-class discussions often revolved around the English-origin characteristics of their partners’ speech and the sociolinguistic reasons for those characteristics. We also talked about how the use of both Spanish and English by my students is different from their partners’ speech patterns. But Spanish is hard! So, once their partners were perceived to be speaking English, it sounds like my students had a hard time sticking to Spanish for their side of the conversations. It is true that there was a rather large difference in language abilities between the two groups. In future partnerships, I think finding more similar groups, in terms of Spanish oral confidence, will go a long way towards reducing the temptation to resort to English for the L2 students.

  2. ¡Muchas gracias por compartir este trabajo!

    Me parece muy valioso que compartan “the partnership logistics”, especialmente, para quienes no lo hemos hecho antes.

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