Spanish Heritage Language Teacher Resources
See here for our UIC online course for heritage Spanish teachers every Fall.
“What placement exam/textbook should we use for our heritage speaker course?"
PLACEMENT:
Are you looking to (1) separate HL from L2 students, (2) determine which level of an HL program they belong; or both?
A very short, written paragraph often answers both questions. After a while, an experienced evaluator can look at a paragraph and decide about questions (1) and (2) above in a very short amount of time. Here is an article about the process we went through at the University of Illinois Chicago (Potowski, Parada, Morgan-Short 2012).
TEXTBOOK SELECTION:
I have pasted some links below under “Student-facing materials”. But first, I highly recommend these steps in this order:
“Why offer a separate Spanish as a heritage language course?” See brochure here.
STEP 1: First, figure out who your heritage speakers are. Be able to describe what they can already do in Spanish and what they cannot yet do.
STEP 2: From the list of things they cannot yet do well in Spanish, choose your learning goals. Your list might look very different from someone else's, even if based on the exact same students.
STEP 3a: How many courses will there be? Which one will fulfill the foreign language requirement (if there is one)?
STEP 3b: Which textbook(s) or other materials match most closely the goals you established in Step 2? The Table of Contents from several
commercially-published textbooks appear below.
STEP 4: Design your placement test using items from Step 3b -- that is, from your curriculum.
Resources for teacher development
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University of Illinois at Chicago online Fall course, Teaching Spanish to Heritage Speakers
Startalk online modules about teaching heritage languages
George Mason University’s online Graduate Certificate in Spanish Heritage Language Education
In person, CARLA: Critical Approaches to Heritage Language Education: Centering Identities, Race, and Power in Language Reclamation
COERLL at the University of Texas-Austin. Heritage Spanish Professional Development Modules
University of Nebraska-Omaha. Online Graduate Certificate in Teaching Spanish to Heritage/ Bilingual Learners
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• Potowski, K. (Expected Fall 2023). Enseñar el español a los hablantes de herencia: Cultivando jardines.
• Potowski, K. (2005). Fundamentos de la enseñanza del español para hispanohablantes en los EE.UU. Arco Libros. Resume puntos principales sobre la enseñanza del español a los alumnos de ascendencia hispana en los Estados Unidos.
• Beaudrie, S., Ducar, C. & Potowski, K. (2014). Heritage language teaching: Research and practice. McGraw Hill.
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• COERLL at the University of Texas at Austin
• Nancy Dominguez’ padlet
• 2022 Heritage Language Symposium
• Teaching Heritage Languages: An Online Workshop. Eight self-paced online tutorials designed for teachers of world and heritage languages. Free access after signing up for a free account.
• Materiales de la Dra. Aracelis Nieves
• SNS teachers networking site: http://teachingsns.ning.com. This is a fantastic & free online community where you can interact with other SNS teachers.
• El Lexile Framework for Reading asesora el nivel de lectura de los alumnos, tanto en inglés como en español.
• A writing rubric, in Spanish, from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
• Spanish spellchecker workshop. An MS Word document that helps students learn how to use a Spanish spellchecker.
• Spanish language arts standards from WIDA
• List of cases of linguistic repression in the USA
• Un folleto del Center for Applied Linguistics, titulado "Why start and maintain an SNS program?" http://www.cal.org/resources/pubs/sns_brochure.pdf
• Fundamentos de la enseñanza del español a los hispanohablantes en los EEUU. K. Potowski, 2005. Resume los puntos principales sobre la enseñanza del español a los alumnos de ascendencia hispana en los Estados Unidos. Presenta un breve panorama de los principales grupos hispanos en los EE.UU., detalles sobre los conocimientos lingüísticos y necesidades académicas de estos alumnos y principios y aproximaciones pedagógicas concretas.
• A debate about the term "Spanglish"
• Carreira & Beeman's excellent book, Voces: Excerpts about how and why people lose their Spanish, and a review I wrote of the book.
• Video, "If you ask me about my Spanish" by Melissa Lozada Oliva: In English and in Spanish
Student-facing materials
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Anecdotas series from One Way Education
Commonlit: Library of texts. Searchable by grade level, genre, theme, literary devices (characterization, figurative language, cause & effect) etc. Teachers can add a variety of features to the texts.
Newsela: A wide variety of texts, historical to current events. Click a button and it changes the reading level.
Santillana: Yabisí (6th), Espanol 7 (7th) and Espanol 8 (8th).
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[Entre Culturas 3 isn’t heritage per se but might be useful]
AP: Temas
Commonlit: Library of texts. Searchable by grade level, genre, theme, literary devices (characterization, figurative language, cause & effect) etc. Teachers can add a variety of features to the texts.
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These are more or less in the order of increasing Spanish proficiency levels, in my best estimation:
Nuestro Idioma, Nuestra Herencia
Conversaciones Escritas 3rd Edition
Otros títulos (I find these prescriptive, grammar-driven, or otherwise less useful):
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El Lexile Framework for Reading asesora el nivel de lectura de los alumnos,
tanto en inglés como en español. -
A writing rubric, in Spanish, from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
Spanish spellchecker workshop. An MS Word document that helps students learn how to use a Spanish spellchecker.
Carreira & Beeman's excellent book, Voces: Excerpts about how and why people lose their Spanish, and a review I wrote of the book.