Claudia Pozzobon Potratz aims for her heritage learners of Spanish to take pride in their bilingualism as they learn to read and write more proficiently in Spanish. A Visiting Professor of Spanish who received her doctorate in Language, Literacy and Culture from Iowa’s College of Education and wrote her dissertation on Spanish heritage learners, Pozzobon Potratz is in her sixth semester of teaching Spanish for Heritage Language Learners. These students are bilinguals who speak Spanish at home or with relatives but have varying degrees of knowledge and control of aspects of reading and writing Spanish because of their circumstances growing up: years of English-only formal education and living in a monolingual state and country. Some of Pozzobon Potratz’s students are English dominant; that is, their spoken English is much stronger than their spoken Spanish; others are more equally bilingual.
Besides teaching Spanish in the Community, Intermediate Spanish, and Speaking in Spanish, which are courses mainly for monolingual English speakers, Claudia has taught two levels of Spanish heritage learners—Intermediate and Advanced for three years. Her favorite assignment for instilling linguistic pride in her students in the Advanced class is called the Linguistic Autobiography, the first essay of the course. She defines this genre as “a personal account of how students learned the languages they know and how they feel about them, as they reflect on the relationship between those languages and their personal lives, including their identity.” The goal of the assignment, she says, is “for students to realize that no matter what their proficiency in Spanish is, their Spanish is not wrong.” By reflecting and writing, “students embrace their heritage culture and language and celebrate their bilingualism and the uniqueness of their bilingual upbringing.”
Pozzobon Potratz has a language goal for the assignment too; before they start writing, she teaches them past tenses (preterit vs. imperfect), as well as rules for using accents Spanish and becoming aware of spelling issues (b vs. v and silent h vs. no h), so they feel more confident about writing their narrative.
Her prompt for the Linguistic Autobiography lists 10 sets of questions to get students thinking about their language use. Claudia emphasizes she wants students to write a unified, coherent essay and not answer the questions one by one; hence, they can skip a question that might not resonate with them.
In the prompt, Claudia asks them, in Spanish of course, if they learned one language first and then another, or if they learned them at the same time. Which of their memories are in English and which are in Spanish? Have they felt rejected for speaking one language or another in an English or Spanish speaking community? Has anyone criticized how they speak Spanish or English?
She also asks whether they have relatives who don’t speak Spanish and the reasons they don’t; whether they’ve had people in their lives that helped them become more bilingual; whether they have traveled to a Spanish-speaking country and have adopted the regionalisms of that nation’s Spanish. Lastly, she asks, “Why is it important for you to speak Spanish? What benefits does speaking Spanish have in the United States? As a bilingual in what areas do you want to improve? What is your action plan for improving and maintaining the languages you know?”
To scaffold the assignment, Pozzobon Potratz spells out a facilitative composing process for students to follow. She recommends that students first think of their ideal audience to write for, someone who wants to know about their language background; often that ideal audience is their own mother, who finds different ways to encourage them to retain their mother tongue. She also tells students that in this first essay of the course, they are building on their knowledge and experience writing essays in English.
“You are not starting from zero. You already know how to write an essay in English,” she explains to them. “And just like in English, your Spanish essays need an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.”
Claudia recommends that students use the above questions to generate a list of what they want to cover, tentatively order the list, and then construct a draft without worrying about perfect grammar and spelling. Then they should revise their draft, making sure their sentences are complete, their verbs are in the correct form, and that their nouns, adjectives, and articles agree—a feature that thankfully, we don’t need to worry about in English. Since this is a beginning assignment, and students have already discussed the linguistic phenomenon of Spanglish (mixing English and Spanglish in the same sentence or discourse), not as a problem, but as a unique part of their bilingual heritage, they are free to use Spanglish to avoid writer’s block.
In the strongest essays, students often realize the magnitude of their own bilingualism and the role of their family in developing it, which they hadn’t considered before. Or students who write compelling and powerful essays are especially honest and vulnerable about both their positive and negative experiences with language. However, she does not penalize students for not sharing details of their negative experiences.
“I respect their choice not to share a lot if they don’t want to,” she says. “After all, their relationship with Spanish and English is fraught and complicated.”
Stronger essays may also tell brave and ironic anecdotes of linguistic injustice—about native English speakers making fun of their English and native Spanish speakers making fun of their Spanish. These students are caught between a rock and a hard place: ni de aquí ni de allá. Such stories show heritage learners’ linguistic wounds, which Potratz uses her course discussions and assignments to heal.
Weaker papers result from the fact that many students are writing in Spanish for the very first time, struggling with spelling and their impulse to write in English, as English writing is all they have ever known. Also, they may become somewhat paralyzed, worried about her reaction, thinking that she expects a perfectly grammatical essay, even when she repeatedly assures students that she expects no such thing.
Pozzobon Potratz says she wants to avoid as much as possible being “a prescriptivist evaluator,” especially because her own bilingual background is different from that of her students’. In her home country of Venezuela, she learned Spanish as her mother tongue first and then studied English, eventually to teach it in Venezuela and then in the US as a Second/Foreign Language. She also knows Italian as a kind of heritage language, as her grandparents are from Italy, and French, which she studied in college. One could say that her experience is more a sequential bilingual development, whereas her heritage learner students have had more a simultaneous bilingual development.
Claudia is passionate about rescuing her students from language stigma and linguistic wounds by instilling pride in them for their accomplishments as bilinguals, including their strong desire to improve their Spanish reading and writing in her course. Her students are fortunate to have such a knowledgeable and caring teacher as an audience for their writing.