Current Approaches to Heritage Spanish and the Identity Construction of Spanish Heritage Speakers: Lessons Learnt from Five European Countries

Abstract

An individual’s social identity, often overlooked in Europe in the field of Spanish as a second or foreign language (S2L/SFL), has always been the focus of attention in the teaching of heritage Spanish in the USA, especially in programmes designed from critical pedagogy and based on a reconstructive narrative of Latino immigration. There, heritage speakers (HS) strengthen their identity as linguistic experts and contribute to positive social change that counteracts the scholastic subordination of Spanish to English in primary schools. In this research based on verified questionnaires, we investigate in the European context (Italy, Poland, Germany, Portugal, and Belgium) how primary–middle school HSs attending extracurricular S2L/SFL classes self-perceive their identity in comparison to S2L/SFL students. The results show that the incidence of the factor “country of origin” is central to identity recognition and highlight the feelings linked to different classroom conditions and dynamics for heritage and S2L/SFL students. To conclude, these results are contrasted with those obtained in the United States.