Current Approaches to Orthography Instruction for Spanish Heritage Learners: An Analysis of Intermediate and Advanced Textbooks

Abstract

ABSTRACT:As it is well known, heritage learners of Spanish have an advantage in oral production and aural comprehension over L2 learners. However, due to their lack of formal instruction in Spanish, their linguistic weaknesses lie in their literacy skills (reading and writing). In terms of writing skills, students mainly struggle with orthography issues (accentuation and spelling) and larger literacy skills (e.g. developing a thesis or organizing ideas). However, there is an important gap in the literature regarding orthographic acquisition since most of the research in the field that focuses on form instruction has predominantly been on grammar acquisition (Anderson, 2008;Montrul and Bowles, 2008; Potowski, 2005, among others). In fact, despite the increasing amount of textbooks with an emphasis on the writing process addressed to this student population, to my knowledge there has not been a study on the current approaches of Spanish heritage learners' textbooks for orthography instruction. After analyzing four popular textbooks for Spanish heritage learners, it can be deduced that the lack of research in this area perpetuates the maintenance of traditional non-communicative explicit instruction of orthography through drills after an explicit explanation of the rules of both accentuation and spelling. However, new textbooks shed some light on the implementation of focus on form teaching techniques commonly used in the L2 classroom such as input-output activities.

Linguistic Factors and the Spelling Ability of Spanish Heritage Language Learners

“…Given this dearth of pedagogical proposals, language textbooks generally rely on spelling activities based on what works for developing spelling skills in more researched populations, such as monolingual and bilingual children. Burgo (2015) explains that some textbooks adapt activities and strategies used in grammar teaching, such as sentence or word completion or fill in the blanks, as well as some communicative-based activities. According to Beaudrie (2012) one of the shortcomings of language textbooks for SHLLs is that they present exhaustive lists of Spanish orthographic patterns instead of focusing on those patterns or words that present the greatest difficulty.…”