Dr. Lucía Beltrán-Ynoa
Lucía is a Dominican-American sociolinguist and professor of Spanish education. She studies heritage learners, dialect variation in US Spanish, and the identity work that runs underneath language classrooms in immigrant communities. Her writing reflects both her academic research and her own experience as a first-generation college student from a Spanish-speaking family.
- Heritage learner identity
- Dialect variation in US Spanish
- Sociocultural theory in language education
- Which Spanish we teach
3 pieces in the archive.
Sociocultural theory and the ZPD, what Vygotsky offers a language teacher that Krashen does not.
Most of US second language acquisition runs on a cognitive frame: input, processing, output, all happening inside one head. Jim Lantolf spent three decades arguing that we were missing the other half of the picture. Language develops in interaction with people, mediated by tools, inside a culture. The Vygotskian frame is the alternative.
Which Spanish do we teach, and what to say to the heritage student whose Spanish you just corrected.
Twenty Spanish-speaking countries. Hundreds of regional varieties. US classrooms that train students mostly on a textbook variety that nobody actually speaks. The choice we make about which Spanish to teach is also a choice about whose Spanish counts.
Heritage learners are not behind. They are different.
A heritage Spanish learner sitting in a Spanish 2 class is not a slow Spanish 2 student. She has a different acquisition profile, different gaps, and different needs. Treating her like a delayed L2 learner is the most common pedagogical mistake in American world language classrooms.
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