Speaking Spanish Outside the Foreign Language Classroom: An Analysis of Learner Narratives

Abstract

Building on contemporary to approaches to narrative theory and analysis, this article examines how university students enrolled in an advanced Spanish-asa-foreign-language course textually position themselves and are positioned by others as legitimate or illegitimate users of Spanish in the stories they tell about speaking the language outside the classroom. Specifically, it highlights the ideologies that learners draw on in realizing these acts of positioning, noting how they both reflect and reproduce particular inequities around ethnicity, social class, and language. Offering a detailed account of the ways in which the focal narratives represent the dynamics of Spanish language interactions within the United States, the article raises additional questions for scholarly research and advocates for more critically informed approaches to Spanish language education.

Resumes and job postings as cognitive tools for narrating Anglophone language learners’ multilingual–professional identities and trajectories in career advising appointments

“…In FWs, stories-and the stories we learn to tell as part of the socialization process-are a vehicle for local identity work and development. Therefore, the presentation of themes below follows Pomerantz (2010), who relied on narrative methods to demonstrate how analytical themes played out interactionally in interviews with advanced classroom learners of Spanish who narratively positioned themselves as ideologically (il)legitimate TL speakers outside of class.…”

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

“…Language learners also reveal their perceptions of communities of language users when narrating their interactions with individuals whom they encounter outside the classroom. In an analysis of interviews with L2 learners of Spanish in the United States, Pomerantz (2010) found that some of her participants positioned themselves as socially superior and linguistically more sophisticated than Spanish‐speaking interlocutors outside of the classroom through the lexical and pragmatic forms they used to describe their interactions with them. For example, a student considered the Spanish that she and her housekeeper used as “limited” because they did not engage in discussions on scholarly topics like literature.…”

“…Research on language ideologies among Spanish L2 learners has drawn primarily on analyses of social positioning in learner narratives (Pomerantz, 2010;Pomerantz & Schwartz, 2011;Schwartz, 2014). Although classroom research has addressed language ideologies and stancetaking in the Spanish HL classroom (Showstack, 2015(Showstack, , 2017, there is a dearth of research investigating expert/novice positioning in classroom interaction among Spanish L2 learners and how this positioning reflects the ideologies underlying learning goals.…”