A mindful teaching strategy helped improve the language and writing skills of students in a public secondary school in a rural province of Argentina. The authors share how they brought about this development.

This article presents a guide to implementing oral history projects in Spanish language courses, drawing from our fifteen-year collaborative initiatives with various community organizations in the Trenton area. Among these is our comprehensive Puerto Rican Oral History Project, which resulted in five short video documentaries and over sixty…

There is no clear-cut division between orality and literacy (Street, 1993). This idea is central to literacy development in the Spanish heritage language (SHL) context because the opportunities to use heritage language (HL) skills are often oral, not written. Furthermore, the cultural situations that speakers find for their language are less…

The development of language courses designed specifically for Spanish heritage learners has recently gained much attention at all levels of education in the US. Since heritage learners started to acquire the language since childhood at home, their needs are different from those of students in the traditional foreign language classroom. To fulfill…

In recent years, writing in Spanish as a foreign or heritage language has assumed more prominence in research and curricular policy in the United States. Increasing numbers of heritage language learners, the emergence of social media tools, renewed interest in writing genres, and changing instruction methods have all influenced how we understand…

This paper describes the personal and professional journey taken by one secondary Spanish teacher to implement the Seal of Biliteracy (SoBL) for English Learners (ELs) in a rural Florida school district. The teacher's goal was to promote bilingual pride among her ELs and to validate and build their bilingual abilities, which had been frequently…

Dual language learners are a growing population in early learning and care settings. Young DLLs have the potential to develop proficiency in two languages when provided adequate supports; however, most teachers of young DLLs feel inadequately prepared to support DLLs. Cultivating Oral Language and Literacy Talent in Students (COLLTS) is an…

Cognates are words that are the same or nearly the same orthographically and semantically in English and Spanish. The majority of the more than 20,000 cognates are academic vocabulary words comprised of Latin and Greek roots and affixes. Several thousand cognates can be found in the picture books that have earned the Américas Book Award, which was…

Oral history is presented in this article as an interpretative exercise for historical events in a Spanish course for heritage language learners at the university level. Through the interview of a Latino immigrant family, students re-examined the history of their own families and increased their linguistic self-esteem. They were guided to become…

Native Spanish speakers from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, who are also English language learners, are a growing population of students in the K-12 classrooms throughout the United States. This particular group of students is oftentimes placed in Spanish-as-a-foreign-language classes that fail to meet their linguistic development…

Mexicanos/Chicanos in the United States have historically suffered derision and mistreatment by the mainstream culture because of their use of nonstandard Spanish and English, as well as codeswitching (alternating between two or more languages or language varieties). In the field of education, codeswitching and the use of nonstandard English and…

This article focuses on language displacement in the High Mountains of Central Veracruz. It begins by presenting a brief historical account of the Nahuatl presence in the region in order to distinguish this group from other Nahuatl-speaking groups. Later, it describes the situation of language loss that is currently underway and argues that the…

This article focuses on two main issues. On the one hand, it deals with early prevention of literacy difficulties. On the other hand, it deals with the same issue once pupils already present serious difficulties in reading and writing. Consequently, this paper has two main aims. Firstly, it aims to show teachers that, in order to carry out…

This case centers on a Vietnamese language and culture program situated within an urban context. It illustrates how sociohistorical and geopolitical contexts interplay in understanding relations within schools as well as school-community relations. A new ethnoburb creates both opportunities and challenges for the Vietnamese community related to…

This article makes the case for using critical pedagogical approaches to the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language (HL). Having different language tracks is not enough: As long as HL learners hold negative linguistic attitudes about their own language variety, they will be unable and unprepared to learn successfully. First, I define who HL…