Critical Language Awareness in the Spanish as a Heritage Language College Classroom

This article analyzes the critical language awareness (CLA) of Spanish university-level students who were enrolled in a 16-week heritage (SHL) course, using CLA as an instructional approach. Students’ attitudes towards bilingualism, Spanglish, variation, and prescriptivist grammar measured via pretest posttest surveys that used four-point Likert scale strongly agree, disagree, or along with text box asking participants to explain their answers. The methods delivered course included analysis code-switching constraints, study standard ideologies monolingual ideologies, stigmatized features found varieties Spanish, English-influenced lexicon. Ten out fourteen items factor which yielded statistically significant change between posttest. Qualitative answer explanations showed some adapted new information did not beliefs at deep level. Future research should identify “CLA proficiency” levels well how differentiate for hold deeply entrenched ideologies.