Language and Identity among Adolescent Heritage Spanish Students

Abstract

This dissertation describes the language and identity trajectories of twelve purposefully selected heritage Spanish adolescents who were currently studying in a heritage language program within an urban high school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These twelve students represented six sibling groups and five different nationalities, specifically Dominican, Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, Salvadorian, and Venezuelan,. The research questions were: 1) How do Hispanic heritage students negotiate their bicultural/bilingual identities?; 2) What is the role of the heritage language in those negotiated identities?; 3) Do these negotiated identities influence their investment to maintain the heritage language?; 4) What are the linguistic manifestations of the Spanish spoken by these bilingual students? Findings of the study revealed that 1) the study participants negotiate their bicultural/bilingual identities in a variety of ways, 2) for some of these students, the heritage language is part of their `out of school' identities, 3) the dominant language ideologies of the school system have had a significant impact on the heritage students' investment in HL practice, and 4) although each participant's identity and linguistic trajectories are distinct, they each have maintained, to a greater or lesser degree, the aspectual preterit/imperfect contrast, and, at the same time have displayed some level of incomplete acquisition of the subjunctive mood. The implications of these findings as they relate to the fields of bilingualism, languages in contact and the developing theory of Heritage Language Acquisition are addressed in the concluding remarks.