SPEAKING SPANISH OUTSIDE THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: AN ANALYSIS OF LEARNER NARRATIVES

Abstract

Building on contemporary to approaches to narrative theory and analysis, this article examines how university students enrolled in an advanced Spanish-as-a-foreign-language course textually position themselves and are positioned by others as legitimate or illegitimate users of Spanish in the stories they tell about speaking the language outside the classroom. Specifically, it highlights the ideologies that learners draw on in realizing these acts of positioning, noting how they both reflect and reproduce particular inequities around ethnicity, social class, and language. Offering a detailed account of the ways in which the focal narratives represent the dynamics of Spanish language interactions within the United States, the article raises additional questions for scholarly research and advocates for more critically informed approaches to Spanish language education.

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