Realities of comfort and discomfort in the heritage language classroom: Looking to transformative positive psychology for juggling a double‐edged sword

This study responds to calls to reexamine the L2 motivational self system framework in order to understand motivations to learn languages other than English. Specifically, we explore Indigenous Taiwanese students’ heritage language learning motivation from a possible selves perspective. Following work on the rooted L2 self, the construct of the Indigenous heritage self is incorporated to capture the passion and conviction that motivates learners to maintain language use and revitalize cultural legacies. A nationwide questionnaire survey was administered to 293 indigenous Taiwanese high school students (aged 15–18). Exploratory factor analysis points to the need to include the Indigenous heritage self in an account of the motivation to learn endangered Indigenous languages. The composite elements of the Indigenous heritage self consist of goals focused on preserving the Indigenous language and cultures, as well as an emotional attachment to the heritage culture. Furthermore, multiple regression results show that learners’ Indigenous heritage self and ideal future self are significant contributors to motivational intensity and classroom engagement. Findings indicate that community‐based motivation is equally important as individual learners’ idealized future images in motivating Indigenous language learning. The article concludes by suggesting curriculum initiatives that incorporate motivational strategy instruction aimed at developing an ideal self for speaking the Indigenous language, bridging classroom content and the cultural immersive experiences that students have outside formal environments.

Heritage identity and Indigenous language learning motivation: A case of Indigenous Taiwanese high school students

Huang,

Chan

2024

Emotions and the language‐ness of experience in heritage language lives

Martínez

2024

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to meet Chicanx cultural theorist Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez at the University of Arizona. After completing a PhD in German language and literature, she went on to a stellar career in Chicanx literatures and cultural studies. I remember asking her why she had chosen to study German instead of Spanish. "Spanish," she said, "was just too charged, too emotional." Her response made me think about how emotional Spanish and Spanish-accented English had been in my life growing up on the Texas-Mexico border. It took me back to the emotions of fear, anger, and resentment that welled inside me whenever I would cross the border with my father who, in broken English, would declare his American citizenship only to be told, "now, how did you ever get to be an American citizen." It also took me back to the emotions of coming out of a slumber to hear undecipherable words spoken in Spanish and feeling a sense of being at home. I was serving as director of the Spanish-for-heritage-learners program at the University of Arizona, and I remember it dawning on me that the work I was doing there was so much more profound than simply "preparing these kids to become Spanish majors and minors," as I had been charged by the department head at the time. The work was indeed emotional-students navigated comforts and discomforts in heritage language classrooms, sometimes having to do with harm or joy experienced outside of school and other times having to do with joy or harm experienced in school. How could we create a program that healed the multiple harms that students had experienced in and through their heritage language? How could we create a program that would be a "safe space" for students to share these emotions? How could we create a program that would tap into the comfort and enjoyment of the heritage language?At the time that I was pondering these questions, there was no technical idiom to describe the role of emotions in language learning, and heritage language education was still viewed largely as linguistic remediation that could be achieved through metalinguistic instruction. In my own thinking, I used the short-hand of "language experience" to describe this aspect of heritage language living. In my 2006 book, Mexican Americans and language: Del dicho al hecho, I defined language experience as "more than just the language itself and more than the deployment of the language in social situations. A language experience is the composite of a group's experience with, in, and through language" (Martínez, 2006, p. 7). With my colleague Robert Train, we reworked this concept to think instead of a languageness of experience as "a complex of dynamic, tension-filled sites of locally embodied particularities, relationalities, positionalities and subjectivities that are woven into our human experiencing, languaging and translanguaging, as we live in the world" (Martínez & Train, 2020, p. 18). The language-ness

Some considerations on the emotions of heritage language learners, teachers, and users

Dewaele

2024

This special issue is both timely and perfectly placed. Interest in heritage language (HL) learning has been growing for a while (Driver, 2022), as has the interest in the emotions of language learners and users (Dewaele & MacIntyre, 2014). By bringing these two strands together, the guest editors have created a powerful research synergy. Just as François Grosjean (1989) famously declared that bilinguals are not the sum of two complete or incomplete monolinguals but have a unique configuration, I would argue that research on the emotions of HL learners, teachers, and users in general can generate unique findings and insights that go beyond the original boundaries. The research presented in this special issue also benefited from recent theoretical, ontological, epistemological, and methodological developments. The first one is the move away from essentialist thinking. The second one is the dynamic view of language systems, both synchronically, diachronically, and contextually. No single aspect of a complex system can be neatly isolated and displayed in a glass case. No single variable follows a linear pattern in its development if the granularity is large enough. Patterns can go up and down; individuals may deviate from the general trend, and individuals may behave differently depending on a wide range of socio-contextual factors but also depending on their mood and degree of tiredness. Everything is loosely interconnected, within the individual, within the groups of peers, within the institution, and within the wider social, economic, historical, ideological, and political contexts. This means that everything can potentially have an influence on everything else and be influenced by it in return. Teachers who are overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and unhappy risk burnout. Such an example is presented in Afreen and Norton's (2024, this issue) contribution to volunteer teaching. At the start of the 2-year period, the volunteers were struggling and had to use emotional labor strategies to keep a smile on their faces. By the end of the period, the working situation had improved, and teacher morale was better with a small remuneration and better organisation. Students are often emotional mirrors of their teachers. It means that many have suffered too, at the beginning of the study, through a process of negative emotional contagion (Moskowitz & Dewaele, 2021). There might have been unseen consequences, as learners may have transmitted this psychological burden to their families. The danger is that a process of negative reinforcement may initiate a negative spiral that affects the mental well-being and performance of teachers and students, parents, and children (see also How to cite this article: Dewaele, J.-M. (2024). Some considerations on the emotions of heritage language learners, teachers, and users.