This study counters the popular assumption that Spanish Heritage Language Learners (SHLLs) on study abroad (SA) in a place of cultural origin can easily adapt and find acceptance due to the linguistic and cultural resources they bring with them. Our study builds on previous work to illustrate a more nuanced and complex story of desires for…

This article examines caregivers' everyday language choices and interactions with children in an urban Zapotec community in Mexico, where Diidxazá is being displaced by Spanish in everyday use. It argues that caregivers' language choices and interactions get entangled in complex ways with the socio-cultural organization of everyday life and with…

This article uses cognitive measures previously developed within linguistic relativity research to explore the thinking patterns of Yucatec Maya-Spanish bilingual children in the Yucatan peninsula. These measures were designed to detect cognitive patterns associated with specific language patterns. Here, these measures are used to test whether 12…

The present study contributes to our understanding of the effects of age and type of linguistic input in the acquisition of Spanish as a second language in adulthood. I examine the Spanish syntax (word order) of three groups of speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico and two bilingual English-Spanish speakers born and raised in the…

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic case study of three displaced Syrian students living in Mexico who were undergoing their university studies. Drawing upon "thirdspace" and language ideology theories this study examined how three Syrian displaced students in Mexico created spaces where they used language to construct and…

Despite the extensive research on bilingual development, our understanding of how lexical competition unfolds in the bilingual mind remains limited. Previous studies have predominantly focused on crosslinguistic competition, neglecting the examination of the competition process within each language and the influence of diverse bilingual…

This paper reports on the family language policy (FLP) of three families in a Nahuatl community in Mexico. It investigates the role of: (1) parental experiences, beliefs, attitudes and expectations; (2) child practices; and (3) broader societal attitudes in shaping these policies. Drawing on survey and interview data, the study points to a tension…

Drawing on life stories and classroom observations, this qualitative study examined how six bilingual maestras enacted and embodied critical biliteracies through bilanguaging love. These maestras were born, raised, and now teach bilingual education on the Texas-Mexico border. Their stories revealed contradictory and complex beliefs about literacy…

Minority language communities lack access to educational technology that facilitates literacy skill building. The approach currently taken by most educational game app developers privileges widely spoken languages and often requires intensive resource investment. In response, a new game app was designed to provide easily localized, pedagogically…

Language revitalization efforts have been critiqued for creating and reproducing linguistic, epistemological, and pedagogical hierarchies that might run counter to a community's needs and interests. Drawing on a seven-year ethnographic and collaborative research with the Maya cultural promoters of the Caste War Museum in Tihosuco, Mexico, we…

One of the main controversial issues in the field of teaching English as a foreign language in México is the decision to use students' mother tongue as a means and an aid for language teaching instruction. On these grounds, the purpose of this study was to explore undergraduate students' preferences and perspectives towards the use of their mother…

Millions engage in learning a Second Language (L2) using their mobile devices with a wide range of success. Concomitantly, there exists a growing interest in research on the effects of mobile-assisted language learning and predictors of learner outcomes (e.g., Loewen et al., 2020; Sudina & Plonsky, 2023). However, few of these apps and studies…

Translanguaging in classrooms opens spaces for multilingual students to engage in learning across the full range of their linguistic repertoire. We argue that one result of translanguaging pedagogy is that it can transform the talk-for-learning in the classroom and create a corriente or flow of ideas that is more free and less constrained than…

Informed by the stories of transnational youth's participation in massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in Mexico, this study explores the language/identity development and successful (re)integration of these youth in Mexican schools and communities. Drawing on students' voices, we utilize a multimodal systemic functional…

This paper is based on the data collected during fieldwork in the northern part of Mexico's state of Puebla in 2018-2019. During that period, there was a need to gather information that would serve as a starting point for the participatory-action research project in San Miguel Tenango, a village where the majority of people speak Nahuatl as their…