Jennifer Leeman: “Language variation, legitimacy and power in heritage language education”

Speaker: Jennifer Leeman, Director of Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Spanish, George Mason University

Heritage Language (HL) pedagogy is often based on a ‘bidialectal approach” that stresses the “legitimacy” of students’ home varieties while focusing on the acquisition of prestige varieties. In this talk, I analyze how such approaches may unintentionally reinforce existing linguistic hierarchies, and I present an alternative critical pedagogical approach grounded in sociolinguistics and students’ understanding of the sociopolitics of language variation.