Spanish Heritage Learners' Emerging Literacy: Empirical Research and Classroom Practice introduces a comprehensive, multi-level empirical study on the writing abilities of Spanish Heritage Learners at the beginner level; the findings guide a broad selection of instructional activities and pedagogical resources to support writing development in the heritage language classroom.

Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of undergraduate students enroll in introductory Spanish courses. For many students, passing these classes is a prerequisite for graduation. Consequently, it is imperative that the exams used in these courses are of the highest possible quality. For decades, the Rasch model (a special case of logistic regression) has been used to evaluate high-stakes language assessment, but has rarely been applied to exams used in classrooms.

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It has been argued that a learner?s L1 articulatory tendency to produce an American English ?retroflex? tongue shape as opposed to a ?bunched? one can facilitate Spanish trill acquisition. This is because the American English retroflex is articulated by moving the tongue apex towards the alveolar ridge, while the ?bunched? articulation is produced by moving the tongue apex down in the opposite direction to the trill. This study examines this articulatory hypothesis by analyzing the tongue shape of two anglophone learners of Spanish.

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e-Research y español LE/L2: Investigar en la era digital es el primer volumen que aborda de manera conjunta las aportaciones al español LE/L2 de la lingüística de corpus, la biblioteconomía y la edición digital. Es excelente para mejorar las técnicas de investigación a la vez que se toma conciencia sobre el uso de las tecnologías en los estudios sobre el español LE/L2.

Contenidos

1. e-Research: fundamentos metodológicos y aplicaciones a la investigación sobre el español LE/L2
Mar Cruz Piñol

This article examines the issue of teaching Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) focusing primarily on the issues of linguistic diversity and the socio-affective issues related to heritage language learners. First, we consider linguistic diversity in speech communities where students use SHL. Second, we discuss students? perceptions of the teaching of Spanish in a linguistically diverse setting and draw upon a corpus of interviews with 35 students attending an SHL program at a large southwestern university in the United States.

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This article presents the results of an empirical investigation into the teaching practices and opinions of UK-based Spanish teachers concerning the treatment of language varieties in the L2/FL classroom. Qualitative and quantitative data obtained through an online survey provide the basis for an analysis of participants? knowledge of dialectal varieties and how to teach them, their perceptions of their own and other varieties, and the extent to which they accept new Pan-Hispanic ideologies and the conception of Spanish as a pluricentric language.

Este estudio responde a la necesidad de analizar empíricamente las actitudes lingüísticas de los docentes de ELE/EL2 hacia la variación dialectal. Dichas actitudes influyen de manera significativa en las prácticas docentes, al tratarse de los modelos lingüísticos más inmediatos para los aprendices.