“Subliminal accent”: Reactions to the rise of Wisconsin English

Distinctive regional varieties of English have only recently emerged in parts of North America, including Wisconsin, where differences appear to be increasing today. We present an experiment in which listeners heard two short samples each from three Wisconsin regions and three other dialect areas. For each area, one sample was recorded pre-1970 and another recorded post-2010. Regional stereotypes were excluded. In a situation of new and still-emerging regional varieties, we expected listeners to be able to more accurately identify recent speech samples versus old samples from Wisconsin. Listeners proved better at recognizing speakers from Wisconsin in newer over older recordings. This complicates previous discussions of dialect awareness, in particular ‘enregisterment,’ with our listeners able to identify Wisconsin speech even in the absence of salient, known dialect features.

Approaches to Language Variation: Goals and Objectives of the Spanish Heritage Language Syllabus

Traditionally, teaching standard Spanish has been at the center of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) instruction (Bernal-Enríquez & Hernández-Chávez, 2003; Hidalgo, 1990, 1997; Leeman, 2005; Martínez, 2003; Valdés, 1978, 1997; Villa 1996, 2002). A growing number of SHL scholars, however, have advocated for shifting the focus of instruction to the students’ language varieties and to dialect awareness (Bernal-Enríquez & Hernández-Chávez, 2003; Leeman, 2005; Villa, 2000). In the fall of 2011, a total of 62 SHL syllabi were collected from four-year public and private universities located in 15 different U.S. states. A content analysis of the course goals and objectives was employed to determine the approach to language variation that each course adopted (eradication, expansion, appreciation, appropriateness-based, or critical). In order to establish reliability, two coders independently categorized the course goals and objectives in all syllabi, obtaining an acceptable inter-rater agreement level. Findings show that earlier eradication approaches have almost disappeared while appreciation approaches are gaining popularity. Other more recent approaches have been adopted in only a small number of syllabi. The results corroborate prior research showing that the teaching of the standard continues to be a central goal in SHL education (Valdés et al., 2006). In addition, SHL courses have been slow to adopt sociolinguistically rich practices.

Classroom Based Dialect Awareness in Heritage Language Instruction: A Critical Applied Linguistic Approach

The present paper argues that while the Spanish for Heritage Learners (SHL) profession has given ample attention to sociolinguistic issues such as linguistic standards and language variation in teacher training, it has not yet given sufficient attention to the promotion of dialect awareness among heritage learners themselves. After discussing the role of dialect in heritage language pedagogy, I review some of the ways in which dialect awareness has been fostered in existing SHL textbooks and ancillary materials. I argue that these approaches can be sharpened by attending to the social functions of language variation. I present a critical applied linguistic approach to dialect awareness that focuses on the indexical aspects of language variation in society. I discuss three strands of this approach to dialect awareness: functions of dialects, distributions of dialects, and evaluation of dialects. Finally, I suggest some activities to present these strands in a first year college level Spanish for heritage learners class.