Polyglots, Multilinguals, and Translanguagers: Spanish as a Gateway Language

The article "Spanish as a Pivot Language for Third Language Learning in the United States" is an important addition to this centennial issue of Hispania, for it offers an assessment of Spanish not only as the dominant language other than English taught in schools, colleges, and universities in the United States, but also as a tool of access for knowledge transfer, as well as connected and networked learning. For this reason, Spanish, particularly when used by multilingual speakers, is as much a gateway as it is a pivot, fostering a host of advantages to both learner and society alike. In this brief rejoinder, then, having consolidated the notion of pivot from a linguistic point of view (i.e., "a widely spoken second language leveraged through explicit instruction to facilitate the learning of a related third language" (Travers 2017: 279), I would like to propose a broader pedagogical reflection on Spanish and its multilingual speakers at this unique moment in the history of language competencies and language study in the United States. As multilingual Spanish speaking students populate classrooms, cityscapes and rural settings in increasing numbers throughout the United States, they are changing the perception and practice of language study today. A first and continuing wave of evolving innovative pedagogical practices can be found in Spanish for Heritage Speakers courses, where the goal to preserve, maintain and advance heritage language competencies constitutes a profound departure from the days in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the "immigrant" languages were a source of shame, to be buried and forgotten, in response to the one nation, one language mentality. Today, in a second and related wave to the first, Spanish functions as a gateway to the rapid acquisition of the cognate languages of French, Italian, and/or Portuguese (Carvalho and Child), utilizing interdisciplinary methods and theories that underscore multilingualism's potential to expand human experience. Thus cognitive, cultural, pedagogical, and linguistic advantages are procured as documented in any number of studies, a few of which are mentioned below.

As internet language learner "Benny the Irish Polyglot" has asserted in his popular blog, learning languages that belong to the same family shortens time to acquisition. Benny's goals are communicative, reflecting the desire among young people to "perform the global self" (Donato and Oliva 2016). Benny, himself, began with Spanish, the hardest, he said, because his first; from there, he claims, the rest of the Romance languages were easy. For Benny, as for the vast majority of our multilingual students, Spanish is the gateway language to the global self. We need to pay attention to Benny, whose pride in multilingualism is echoed among students who are using their Spanish as precisely that gateway tool to new forms of sociability and communication—forms that no longer aim for a closed academic outcome, but rather social expansion and intercultural depth. Developmental researchers have also found facilitated levels of interpersonal understanding among multilingual children, even among those for whom multilingualism is passive and related primarily to comprehension (Kinzler 2016b). This research corroborates the importance of encouraging particular competencies (i.e., excelling in reading or oral comprehension at a greater rate than speaking or writing) as significant benchmarks in multilingualism, especially when viewed in a context of language fluidity. Indeed, the burgeoning research on "the multi-lingual turn" in language acquisition (see May 2014) highlights new acquisition strategies, with forms of language learning that encompass polyglot dialogue, intercomprehension, translanguaging, and translation, all of which engage multiple languages—L1, L2, L3, Ln—synchronically. Claire Kramsch (2009) has advocated for making sites of language learning multilingual so that they cohere more closely to the lived experience of hybrid identities, and cultural-linguistic practices where fluid forms of language exchange are the norm.

Benny's anecdotal musings about learning multiple languages and how he goes about it espouse a form of networked learning that puts large amounts of linguistic...