Amàlia Llombart-Huesca: Spelling in Spanish Heritage Language Education

Spelling in Spanish Heritage Language Education by Amàlia Llombart-Huesca focuses on the importance of spelling for Spanish Heritage Language Learners (SHLLs), creating an indispensable resource of researchers and instructors. Read on for a Q&A with an author on why she chose to focus on spelling, how she addresses curricular and pedagogical gaps, and how her own experience shaped the book.

Who is the intended audience for your book? Is it aimed at educators, researchers, or both?

The book is aimed at both educators and researchers. Since there has not been a lot of research on spelling development in this specific student population, there are not many materials to prepare educators to understand the spelling proficiency of their students. Not all errors are the same, even if they look similar. They have different sources, and they need to be addressed differently. Educators need this understanding, and this is what I want to provide in the book. But I am also aiming this book at researchers, especially those in the field of Spanish heritage language education. This book might serve as a springboard for them to engage in this line of research, as well as to make connections between research on spelling and other lines of research, such as vocabulary development, metalinguistic awareness, multiliteracies pedagogy, etc.

What led you to focus on spelling among Spanish Heritage Language Learners (SHLLs)?

I would say out of sheer intellectual curiosity. I was very curious about the spelling errors my students made, their source, the patterns they followed, etc. I also noticed that some misspellings are very persistent, even in students who read a lot in Spanish in their Spanish upper division courses. So, naturally, I also became interested in developing the right strategies to address these misspellings, especially when I realized there were no guidelines about how to do it. And how could there be when the research had not been done? Also, when talking with Spanish instructors, even those who conduct research on SHLLs education, I saw that they did care about spelling in their classroom.

And, finally, as a linguist myself, I couldn’t help seeing the “linguistic” aspect of spelling. Spelling is a convention, yes, but this convention is built on language structure. I was fascinated by the things I learned about how students were “seeing” the language by

looking at the way they spelled it.

In your introduction you state that there is often a disconnect between the academic backgrounds of researchers. Can you explain this disconnect and how it can be resolved?

There are different research sectors that relate to the spelling development of SHLLs. On the one hand, there is a research field on SHLLs, usually done by researchers with a background in linguistics, including applied linguistics and/or sociolinguistics. This research naturally veers its attention toward linguistic aspects of language production, such as phonological and grammatical variation. Within the research that revolves around literacy development in SHLLs, the attention has been placed mainly on advanced levels of literacy. After all, we are talking about secondary and college level students. On the other hand, the large body of research on how spelling is developed is conducted by researchers in psychology and education and has focused mainly on monolingual and bilingual children at the elementary school level, which is the level when, typically, individuals develop their spelling skills, while learning how to read and write. I would like to see collaboration between these two sectors. (And I have to admit that although I try to bridge the gap between these two fields in my research and I would love to engage in collaborative projects, I have not sought that collaboration myself.) I imagine that for this collaboration to take place, there should be an interest by SHLLs researchers in further pursuing research on spelling and reading, and a realization on the part of reading and spelling specialists of the interesting and unexplored territory that SHLLs offer to the understanding of how spelling is developed.

How does this book address a curricular and pedagogical gap for teaching spelling to SHLLs? Which pedagogical methods make up this book?

I would start by saying that I believe the curriculum gap exists for SHLLs secondary education in general. But with respect to spelling, specifically, let us take, for example, the “Common Core Language Arts / Literacy standards” (Spanish version) for K–12 levels. The problem is that these standards are made with students who enroll in a primary school dual-immersion program in mind. After sixth grade, the Common Core standards barely make any references to spelling, because this skill has been addressed in previous years in the dual-immersion system. However, most SHLLs do not take their first Spanish course until they are in high school. No curricular guidance exists to address spelling in secondary education for those students who begin their Spanish education at that level. And since not much research exists on the topic, not much pedagogical guidelines have been developed for classroom implementation.

How has your own experience informed this book?

My university places great value in the Teacher-Scholar model, which blends teaching and scholarship into a single, integrated endeavor. In following this model, my teaching experience greatly informs my research. My studies always emerge from things I have observed in my classroom. And all the strategies I propose are activities I have used in my courses myself. There is also a personal experience that has had an impact on my pursuing this line of research. I grew up in a bilingual home, in Barcelona, speaking mostly Catalan, with my parents and sister, and Spanish with some family members. But when I started school, in 1974, education was only in Spanish, and this is the language I learned how to read and write in. Years later I started reading and writing in Catalan, but my literacy skills in this language, and mostly, my confidence, never surpassed the skills and confidence I have when writing in Spanish. My teaching and research with SHLLs, in general, is greatly informed by my own experience as a bilingual, and in particular, the experience of struggling with spelling (in one language) as an educated adult is something that resonates with what I see in my students. But it is not only that struggle. I think the key moment was the first time I wrote something in Catalan, when, to my amazement, I saw words coming out of my pencil in that language. That is a strong feeling that has remained in my memory. And this is also important, because it is easy to take for granted the commonalities between languages and focus only on the spelling errors students produce, but we should also value and appreciate the bulk of spelling development that was already conducted in the other language.