“Are There Any Mexicans Listening?” Stancetaking and Language Ideologies in a Spanish L2 Classroom

Abstract

This study investigated classroom interaction through the framework of stancetaking (Du Bois, 2007) to understand how Spanish second language (L2) learners positioned themselves when participating in communicative language learning activities. Data came from transcribed audio and video recordings of three 90-minute lessons in one intermediate-level U.S. high school Spanish class. We examined how the students indexed epistemic stances toward their grammar explanations, and affective and evaluative stances toward the Spanish language and native (L1) Spanish speakers during peer interaction. Despite the burgeoning Spanish-speaking community near where the data were collected, L2 learners' linguistic practices indexed stances of expertise regarding their knowledge of Spanish grammar and vocabulary rather than their potential to meaningfully interact with the people who lived and worked in their community. In addition, some indexed negative affective and evaluative stances toward L1 Spanish speakers. Findings signal the need to examine how target-language speakers are positioned in classroom practices.

What Does Explicit Knowledge Look Like? An Analysis of Information Structure in Rule Formation by L2 Learners and Its Relationship With Guided Inductive Learning

“…Some PACE research examines the differential effects of deductive instruction versus the PACE approach from a product‐oriented perspective (Juffs & Fang, 2022; Moranski & Zalbidea, 2022), whereas others adopt various process‐oriented perspectives (Azkarai et al., 2022; Davin & Kushki, 2022; Mattson–Prieto & Showstack, 2022; Toth & Gil–Berrio, 2022; Wagner & Park, 2022). Davin and Kushki (2022) provided a more nuanced description of the rules generated regarding inchoative uses of the Spanish pronoun “se,” some of which were highly metalinguistic, referring to grammatical relations and verb conjugation.…”

“…In that regard, a recent research agenda grounded in sociocultural theory and cognitive–interactionist frameworks has paid particular attention to metalanguage and rule formation exclusively within GI contexts (Azkarai et al., 2022; Mattson–Prieto & Showstack, 2022; Toth & Gil–Berrio, 2022; Toth et al., 2020; Wagner & Park, 2022); such research operationalized metalanguage in terms of rule formation generated through co‐constructed classroom discourse among groups of students and then analyzed the learning process as a representation of metalinguistic awareness. Results revealed that co‐constructed metalanguage among learners is constrained by the level of expertise of the teacher who guides the process (Davin & Kushki, 2022; Wagner & Park, 2022); that it tends to focus on meaning over form (Azkarai et al., 2022; Davin & Kushki, 2022); that it varies according to task design, group dynamics, and individual‐learner agency (Davin & Kushki, 2022; Toth et al., 2013; Toth & Gil–Berrio, 2022); and that it may consist of informal, nontechnical language, variably influenced by the previous metalinguistic knowledge that learners bring to the interactive task (Toth et al., 2020).…”