Telecollaboration: from linguistic insecurity to linguistic confidence in Spanish as a heritage language

Abstract

AbstractFor heritage speakers (HSs), speaking their heritage language (HL) sometimes comes accompanied by HL anxiety and/or lack of confidence in their HL skills Although, HL anxiety and lack of confidence in the HL usually intertwine with few opportunities to use the language and/or being perceived as speakers of a stigmatized variety of the HL, the present study focuses on telecollaboration as a catalyst for linguistic confidence in the HL. For six weeks, 13 dyads of HSs and Mexican Spanish speakers synchronously interacted via Zoom and Google Docs. To observe the effects of telecollaboration on HSs’ linguistic confidence, data were collected via weekly written reflections and the recordings of the Zoom meetings. Although all HSs participants were enrolled in third-year courses for Spanish HSs at a large public U.S. university in Texas, their proficiency levels varied from low self-perceived to high self-perceived proficiency. Results exhibited that these differences did not derive in distinct outcomes and all the participants could develop linguistic confidence when interacting in their HL. These results shed light into the importance of providing HSs with more resources to maintain their HL and encouraging them to use Spanish in different contexts.Keywords: TelecollaborationSpanish Heritage speakerslinguistic confidencelinguistic insecurity Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Linguistic confidence is a concept that was firstly used in the field of Second Language Acquisition as a predictor of the Willingness to Communicate Model (see Clément et al., Citation2003; MacIntyre, Citation1994; MacIntyre et al., Citation1998). This construct is defined as a ‘variable encompassing both a lack of anxiety and positive self-ratings of L2 proficiency’ (cf. MacIntyre et al., Citation1998; Sampasivam & Clément, Citation2014, p. 25).2 From the three-orientations toward Language Diversity Model (Nover, Citation1995), HLs or minority languages may be seen from a language-as-a-problem orientation in the United States. From this perspective, minority languages are devaluated in favor of the dominant language. In this sense, the maintenance and use of minority languages become acts “undertaken by individuals to mitigate…the effects of [this linguistic] domination” (de Heredia, Citation2013, p. 6).3 The contact between participants from both universities was possible because the author and the professor from Mexico are long-time acquaintances.4 Results reported in the present work correspond only to these 26 participants.5 Based on the results from the pilot study (Guerrero-Rodriguez, Citation2021), it was observed that participants who worked in same-gender pairs/groups felt more comfortable interacting with each other than those who were randomly assigned to mixed-gender pairs.6 The project was assessed based on completion.7 The instructor from Mexico established the minimum length of the conversations in English. This in order to minimize the anxiety experienced by her students for speaking English with a person from the U.S. Students interacted only five times since participants from the pilot study had reported that it was complicated to meet every week due to each person’s different schedules and activities.8 Participants did not receive any training on the dynamics of U.S. Spanish, language use, heritage bilingualism, etc. All participants were only said that this project was a cultural and linguistic exchange between college students.9 Data come from the analysis of the reflection participants submitted prior to the first interactions with the Mexican students.10 Based on participants responses to the Bilingual Language Profile.11 Participants had interacted with their Mexican partners for 1 hour minimum (i.e., 3 interactions of at least 20 minutes each one) and had maintained two written interactions. On average, these participants interacted for 2.30 hours total.12 Native-speakerism (Holliday, Citation2006) is an ideology that posits the native speaker as the ideal language teacher (Viáfara González, Citation2015, Citation2020; Widdowson, Citation1994) based on monolingual ideologies, purism and “no accent” ideologies (e.g. Cook, Citation1999; Lippi-Green, Citation1997; Train, Citation2007).