Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States: The State of the Field

Contributors

Contributors Sara M. Beaudrie is an assistant professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University of Arizona. She also directs the program on Spanish for heritage learners. She has published articles in leading academic journals such as the Heritage Language Journal, Spanish in Context, Hispania, Linguistics and Education, and Foreign Language Annals. She has also presented papers at regional and national conferences on heritage language pedagogy and development and heritage language program and curriculum development. Her current research focuses on the acquisition of orthography by heritage language learners and heritage language pedagogical issues. She received a PhD in second-language acquisition and teaching from the University of Arizona. Maria M. Carreira is a professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance, German, and Russian Languages and Literatures at California State University, Long Beach, and codirector of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on heritage languages in the United States, particularly Spanish; heritage language pedagogy; and Spanish as a world language. She is the author of four college-level Spanish textbooks for heritage language learners, including Sı́ se puede (Cengage, 2008). Ana M. Carvalho is an associate professor at the University of Arizona, where she also directs the Portuguese Language Program. She is a sociolinguist who is interested in language variation and change in situations where languages are in contact. Her recent publications include a coedited volume, Romance Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2010); and an edited volume, Português em Contato (Iberoamericana , 2009). In addition, she has published articles in journals such as Language Variation and Change, Hispania, Spanish in Context, and Southwest Journal of Linguistics, and chapters in Linguistic Theory and Language Development in Hispanic Languages, Language Diversity in the United States, and Portugués del Uruguay y Educación Bilingüe. She is also the associate editor of Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. 291 292 CONTRIBUTORS M. Cecilia Colombi is a professor and chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Davis. She is a Fulbright Specialist for Applied Linguistics/TESOL-Second-Language Education (2011–16). Her research areas include Spanish linguistics, educational linguistics, sociolinguistics, Spanish in the United States, second-language acquisition, writing development, and Spanish systemic functional grammar. She is currently working on a pedagogical introduction to systemic functional grammar of Spanish. Her recent publications include the book Palabra abierta, coauthored with Jill Pellettieri and Mabel Rodrı́guez; the chapter ‘‘Multilingual California: Spanish in the Market,’’ in Multimodal Texts from Around the World: Cultural and Linguistic Insights, (Palgrave , 2012); and ‘‘A Systemic Functional Approach to Teaching Spanish for Heritage Speakers in the United States,’’ in the journal Linguistics and Education (2009). Cynthia M. Ducar is associate professor of Hispanic linguistics at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include attitudes and motivations of Spanish heritage language learners, US varieties of Spanish, and textbook presentations of Spanish, as well as the intersection of language politics and ideologies of language in the United States. Her recent publications have appeared in Language , Culture & Curriculum, Foreign Language Annals, and Heritage Language Journal, as well as in several edited volumes. Marta Fairclough is associate professor of Spanish linguistics and director of heritage language education in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. She previously served as department chair and director of undergraduate studies. Her research focuses on heritage language education, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics, with an emphasis on US Spanish. She has published Spanish and Heritage Language Education in the United States: Struggling with Hypotheticals (Iberoamericana, 2005), and numerous book chapters and articles in journals. Some of her recent publications appeared in Language Testing, Hispania, and Foreign Language Annals. She received her PhD from the University of Houston. Joseph Harrington is currently finishing his doctorate in Spanish linguistics at the University of California, Davis. His primary research focus is literacy in Spanish as a second language, particularly the longitudinal development of academic writing. His other research interests include functional linguistics, discourse analysis, lexical development, corpus linguistics, sociocultural theory, and technology-supported pedagogy. Jennifer Leeman is associate professor of Spanish at George Mason University and research sociolinguist at the US Census Bureau. Her research focuses on ideologies and discourses of language, race, ethnicity, and nation; Spanish in the CONTRIBUTORS 293 United States; and critical approaches to Spanish language education. Her recent articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Heritage...