Saber español sí sirve ” Academic Validation of Spanish as a Heritage Language 1

The article offers an account of the challenges and successes encountered in the process of opening a new Professional Spanish Minor, targeted mainly to Heritage Spanish speakers in a small traditional liberal arts college in the Midwest region of the USA. The article introduces the concept "bi-directional scaffolding", and some of the topics discussed are the motivation for establishing the new program, the choice of curriculum, and the process used to involve diverse Faculty. Additionally, the results of an opinion survey distributed among Heritage Spanish speakers are presented, in which their career expectations and current perceptions of their life at this college have provided a much more accurate framework to design the new minor. Conclusions include a reflection on programmatic solutions for the needs of Hispanic students in our institution. The article proposes an inter-institutional dialogue regarding program standards and curricular schemes for Heritage Spanish students nationwide.


Introduction
This article presents an account of the process behind the design of a new Professional Spanish Minor in a private four-year college in the Midwest.2 Considerations are made regarding the challenges overcome as well as the gains in the progression of the idea that started as a utopia in informal conversations in the Spanish program. As the new minor has crystallized in the institution, far-reaching factors have come into play regarding the nature, extent, and focus of the program, which should be part of a national conversation to reach consensus.
The creation of this minor responds to a dramatic increase in the diversity of the institution where the study takes place. Where students of color and international faculty or international students passed unnoticed due to their minimum percentages, now availability of diverse cultural events and an increased presence of students and staff of color have become a normal feature of the campus. Gradually, demographics in all communities have changed, and a new era in the institution has flourished with a wider diversity spectrum.
This demographic transformation has been due in part to a series of generous cohorts of Hispanic students registered in the college; other college policies such as an enhanced focus on hiring diverse Faculty and a strengthened International Students Program have played an important role as well. Yet, this article focuses on the sudden increase of Hispanic students who represent the first offspring of waves of Latino immigrants arriving in the 1960s and 70s, bringing a richer variety of spoken languages, economic status, and skin colors to the institution. This new demographic wave was clearly perceived by the Faculty in the Spanish program who detected the need to provide pedagogical differentiation for the increasing number of Heritage Spanish students erratically registering in Elementary Spanish courses: Their learning needs did not match those of non-heritage speakers and their presence in the classroom posed more questions than answers. Besides, it was not uncommon to see these heritage speakers visiting Spanish Faculty offices with inquiries about how to best use their bilingual skills, whether in potential employment on campus or attending upper classes that explored their parents' cultures -which they felt was their own, at least in a way. Informal conversation started amongst the Spanish Faculty about the possibility of opening new classes for these heritage speakers, and even exploring service learning and community engaged projects as part of the program offerings. Yet the ever-lasting question of whether the Spanish program would count on the human power to sustain another track of studies for this specific population pended over Faculty, menacing this innovative spirit. Eventually, these conversations evolved into the creation of the Professional Spanish Minor which is concurrently supported by and contributing to the rising research field of heritage speaker's language education.  (Gutiérrez, 2013), and in the 1970s, an additional wave of Castro's Cuban expatriates accounted for more than 7% of the nation's Latino population. Subsequently, a series of political refugees and asylees from Central America found new homes in the United States when fleeing the political unrest of the 1980s in their countries (Gutiérrez, 2013). In turn, the educational system of the country has received and provided education to these newcomers' offspring regardless of the numerous challenges posed by diversity in the student body. Today, Spanish heritage students constitute a robust percentage of cohorts accessing higher education. According to the United States Census Bureau, by 2016, 70,ooo Latino students had accessed undergraduate college, and 641,000 were in the process of finishing grade 12, 808,000 were in grade 11, and yet another 982,000 were in grade 10 (United States Census Bureau, 2016). Higher education is presently witnessing the arrival of such reported cohorts in grades 10 and 11, thus accounting for a steep increase in racial and economic diversity on campuses. At North Central College (NCC), where this study takes place, the Office of Admissions, reports that during the last seven years, an important growing trend among students who declare Hispanic ethnicity in both first year and transfer3 students has taken place (North Central College, 2011-2018) (see Table 1).

Theoretical Framework
As a natural consequence of this demographic change, the Spanish program in this institution has gradually seen a shift in the student composition where the increase of Heritage Spanish students (HS students) stands out. Typically, these -previously fewer -students had been placed in upper beginner courses through the traditional language placement test used for all incoming students. But the effectiveness of such test, which seemed to respond well when evaluating non-heritage Spanish L2 learners, began to be questioned by reflective Faculty as it failed to accurately identify and suggest adequate placement for HS students who have different language learning needs. Not less critical were the methodological conversations about the work in the classrooms where the mix of Spanish heritage and non-heritage populations seemed to create a challenging tension of opposite learning needs. Concurrently with these placement issues, Spanish Faculty was regularly holding consultation with HS students regarding their search for venues to further profit from their knowledge of the language, either through special projects in upper Spanish courses where they had been placed -and where they themselves perceived the discrepancy in language competence with that of their peers-, or through concrete tutoring and employment opportunities on campus that would help with their income needs. In sum, multiple issues were brought up by the increased presence of HS students on campus, and the Spanish program was listening. Faculty observations were in tandem with research observations that suggest that when HS students and non-heritage students are placed in the same language classroom, their interests and pedagogical needs point to conflicting directions (Potowski K., 2004;Potowski K., 2008;Roca, 2016). While the former set of students may have a limited formal understanding of grammar patterns and rhetoric analysis, they are able to use Spanish fluently. On the other hand, the latter group has developed specialized knowledge of the morpho-syntactic and rhetoric patterns of the language, yet, are still in the process of acquiring fluency. This sort of classroom dynamic triggers a clear divide in the student community, with visible adverse effects on the motivational component of both groups.
In fact, as HS students have limited academic knowledge to follow the metalinguistic conversations about Spanish in the lower level of Spanish L2 classroom, they lose motivation in class discussions and tend to drop attendance rates and grade averages. In turn, this often impacts their own self-esteem when realizing that fluency in the language does not necessarily imply academic knowledge of its formal features which seem, at times, foreign for them. On the other side, non-heritage students may also diminish their motivation for learning when they realize that, in spite of the dedication that they have put into the academic study of the language, there is yet a long way to attain the fluency that their heritage-speaker classmates have. In sum, both populations of students were being poorly served with the program structure at the moment. The need for differentiation at the classroom and program level was presenting itself loud and clear to the Spanish Faculty. From a pedagogical point of view, the mixture of HS students and non-heritage students in the elementary or low intermediate levels called for highly complex classroom management strategies to do both, provide differentiated instruction to meet the seemingly opposite learning needs of each group (Brinton, 2008;Montrul, 2012), and promote integrations in the classroom community.
In particular these mixed classrooms require an environment with what I have called "bi-directional scaffolding": in other words, the fluent, colloquial knowledge of HS students may support fluency development in non-heritage students; while the latter would assist the HS students in developing formal, academic knowledge of the morpho-syntactic aspects of Spanish. The concept of bi-directional scaffolding in mixed language classrooms is one that small institutions like NCC are intuitively familiar with. Due to the relatively low number of students, these institutions necessarily knit together groups that have somehow similar language competence levels, yet with a high degree of variance. And, while skillful Faculty handles well such methodologically challenging dynamics in the classroom, the presence of fluent HS students implies a heightened degree of differentiation not realistically attainable in these lower levels.
The gradual -yet significant -changes in the demographic scenario, and the subsequent pedagogical and institutional adaptations that these called for, motivated NCC Faculty to propose a new track of studies to meet the needs of Spanish HS students. Initially, conversations only focused on low scale modifications and additions to already existing mixed courses. However, it was soon realized that this limited vision would not only just augment the pedagogical complexity of the courses, but also would fail to provide HS students with sufficient learning opportunities to expand and solidify their knowledge of the academic register of the language.
Furthermore, one of the driving forces behind the creation of the new minor was the recurrent inquiry from HS students regarding "practical" ways to use their Spanish command to either obtain an on-campus job, or to use it in their careers. Not uncommonly, these HS students come from low SES, where their parents work long shifts for minimum wages or less, and where, often, lack of legal documentation hinders the family's options in countless ways. Usually, HS students in NCC have to work more than one job to contribute to family finances and, therefore, are prone to develop a financial-success approach towards their education. In other words, they have quite concrete income-oriented expectations from their higher education degree, with particular emphasis on practical-as opposed to theoretical-subjects of study.
The factors described above triggered a reality-check attitude regarding the status of our own Spanish program in terms of meeting the needs of the increasing waves of HS students. According to research (Beaudrie, Ducar, & Potowski, 2014;Fairclough, 2016), these scenarios call for concurrent actions: From one angle, a revision of curriculum in order to identify the essential classes best suited for HS students, as they need to develop academic competency of the language at the same time than profiting from their already acquired fluency. From a second angle, Faculty needed to be informed about content areas most appealing to HS students, in order to capture their interests and priorities through our program. By combining these two strategies, a win-win situation would be generated, in which students would obtain the language education that addressed both-their language learning and career-oriented needs-while the institution -and the Spanish program-would potentially boost enrollments by attracting larger numbers of HS students4.

Method
In order to be able to formally identify HS students and to find out about their interests, two tools were employed: A new set of questions was added to the regular Spanish placement exam taken by incoming fluent speakers, and an opinion survey was conducted targeting current HS students in NCC.
The Spanish program in NCC has traditionally used a multiple choice, computer-administered placement exam with all incoming students taking language credits as requisite for their degrees. This exam includes mainly receptive skills (i.e. grammar/reading, and listening exercises), and it had served the program well during the years precedent to those with larger cohorts of HS speakers. During the last 7 years, NCC has seen the Hispanic population double the numbers registered seven years ago (See Table  1), thus calling for adequate adaptations in the Spanish program. For this reason, the placement exam was modified following the Online Placement Exam utilized in the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) (Potowski K., Parada, Megan-Short, 2012). This test focuses on a series of vocabulary items that reflect colloquial expressions typically only known by heritage (native5) speakers, but not commonly handled by non-heritage students. The tool proved to be an effective identifier in UIC where piloting results offered evidence that the two competence levels at stake were differentiated with statistical significance, based on colloquial vocabulary testing. (Potowski K., Parada, Megan-Short, p. 65, 2012). These colloquial vocabulary items were piloted in intermediate Spanish classes in NCC, and the results reproduced the findings of UIC: HS speakers in NCC responded accurately to 90-100% of the items, while non-native speakers would respond accurately to less than 60% of the items. In the fall of 2018, the vocabulary items were aggregated to the regular placement exam in NCC, and 7 incoming students were identified as heritage speakersor with an advanced proficiency in conversational Spanish -thus placed in upper intermediate Spanish courses. However, while the NCC placement test has the technological advantage that it speeds up the classification of students, it provides limited information regarding testers' oral proficiency as it measures only passive skills (i.e. reading, listening) (Beaudrie S. M., 2016) . Therefore, in the case of students whose numerical score would classify them as heritage speakers, a brief interview was conducted by proctoring Spanish Faculty in order to corroborate whether the student actually had conversational fluency, and then either confirm the placement in a high intermediate level, or recommend a lower level class should the student's conversational skills lacked fluency.
As mentioned above, a second aspect needed to be considered in order to successfully address HS students in NCC: these cohorts of students have a specific interest in 'practical' (as opposed to theoretical) programs of study, with 'concrete' possibilities conducive to employment and/or income at the end of their higher education path. Faculty has found out about these priorities through conversations with HS students visiting office hours in which students express their interest to enhance their degrees thanks to their language fluency. In order to collect more detailed data regarding HS students' interests, a smallscale opinion survey was designed as a 3-minute, online, anonymous task, including 22 items with a Likert scale6. Collection of results took a full semester7, as many HS students may be reluctant to self-identify as such given the current seemingly hostile environment in the country towards Hispanic immigrants. The promotion of the survey was made via a friend of a friend-method, and it counted with the participation of 37 HS speakers. The survey first asked participants to self-declare whether they were current NCC students and conversational Spanish speakers, which filtered for Spanish L2 speakers and non-speakers of Spanish. Subsequently, participants would provide their opinions about questions that addressed three major themes: a) Questions about the usefulness of having Spanish language skills: These questions intended to determine intrinsic motivation factors related to ethnolinguistic pride and actual use of Spanish (Gardner 1985;Marijuan, 2017) b) Questions about their motivation to consider classes in the Spanish program: These questions intended to determine extrinsic motivation factors for studying Spanish (Gardner 1985;Marijuan, 2017) c) Questions about their expectations regarding ideal classes in the program: These questions intended to find out what foci of studies would be attractive for these students, should the Spanish program be interested in accommodating these interests. Although this may, at a glance, appear as a simple marketing strategy, the question tackled the need to capture HS students interests in the current historical moment where Humanities and/or language studies tend not to be chosen as a profitable career (Pettit, 2018).
The survey allowed the collection of quantitative data (Appendix I), more accurately informing Faculty about ethnolinguistic and motivational aspects in HS students. The survey responses revealed that while HS students may find their Spanish skills only somehow useful in academic settings, its usefulness is valued much higher in conversational contexts (Questions 16,18,24 and 25). In terms of learning Spanish 5 Heritage speakers are considered native speakers. (Fishman, 2001;Valdés, 2001) 6 See full questionnaire in Appendix II 7 For full data set see Appendix 1 academically being one of their objectives, almost 95% of participants declared expecting to learn to read and write well in Spanish, and over 75% of the responses declared a strong interest in taking classes about the Hispanic culture (Questions 10,20,29,30). Interestingly, the current offerings of the Spanish program did not reveal an elevated interest in participants; only 67.57% agree that the Spanish program offers interesting classes, not much differently from a confirming question where 48.65% somehow or totally disagree that the Spanish program in NCC does not offer interesting classes (Questions 8, 15). On the other hand, Hispanic cultural events received much favorable ratings: 83.79% of the responses indicated that participants totally or somehow agree to enjoy the events, while 97.30% somehow or totally disagreed with the sentence "I do not like Hispanic cultural events" (Questions 26, 31). The section of the survey that perhaps revealed the most unexpected and clear-cut responses was the last one, where participants were asked to check the names of all the classes in the Spanish program that they would like to see offered (Question 32). An overwhelming 91.89% chose "Internships in Spanish", followed by an 83.78% for "Spanish for the Professions." Other classes with high rankings are Hispanic Linguistics, Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Hispanic Film, and Hispanic Civilizations respectively (Table 2).

Discussion
Results from this survey were quite revealing in terms of what HS students currently expect from their higher education in relation to the study of Spanish. The favorable attitude towards the usefulness of their conversational Spanish skills may be considered an inherent intrinsic motivation to study the language, which is complemented by their enjoyment of the Hispanic cultural events on campus (Gardner, 1985;Dörnei, 1998;Gardner, 2011;Dörnei Z. and Ushioda, E., 2013). Further, extrinsic motivation is represented by their interest in reading and writing well in Spanish, and their interest in internships where they would use their language skills in concrete and practical ways. In other words, in terms of motivation for the study of the language, this sample of HS students exhibits strong motivation which would correlate positively with successful language studies, should they decide to pursue such career path. (Gardner, 1985;Dörnei, 1998;Gardner, 2011;Dörnei Z. and Ushioda, E., 2013).
Data also indicate that, at the time of the survey, the Spanish program in NCC may not have been offering appealing classes to these participants. From the six highest ranked classes (i.e. Hispanic Linguistics, Hispanic Sociolinguistics, Hispanic Film, and Hispanic Civilizations) only two were offered annually -Hispanic Civilizations, and Spanish for the professions, and another -Hispanic Linguisticswas only offered bi-annually. Additionally, the highest ranked option -Internships in Spanish -was not offered at all. In other words, there seemed to be a disconnect between HS students' expectations in terms of language study, and NCC Spanish academic options at the time of the survey. Such may have been one of the reasons behind the fact that a high proportion of HS students who started in the lower intermediate courses tended not to continue with the advanced courses, and only a handful of HS students declared Spanish as a major or a minor. At the time of the survey, the Spanish program focused on morpho-syntactic development at the elementary levels, and literary topics at the advanced levels. Thus, the focus of the program may not have been perceived by HS students as one with 'practical' orientations or 'employment conducive', but instead, merely as 'academic' (Pettit, 2018). As mentioned earlier, previous conversations amongst the Spanish Faculty addressed the need to offer a path of studies that would meet the language learning needs of HS students, and at the same time, would take advantage of their sociolinguistic knowledge and oral fluency. For this, a new Professional Spanish Minor was articulated in a way which HS students would initially be placed in advanced Spanish composition courses, and then gradually develop professional, career-conducive ties within the community. This program seems to be unique amongst similar colleges in the region, and offers a real-time alternative for the populous Spanish speaking students from communities in the area.
With regards to the design of the new minor, limited Faculty allocation resources hindered the ideal scenario of creating classes specifically designed for HS students where prosodics and ethnolinguistic features of the study of the language would be addressed (Potowski K. , 2005;Potowski K. , 2002). Instead, the available resources involved a curricular re-accommodation of upper intermediate classes in which the language learning needs of HS students were accommodated and effectively integrate the dynamics in the classroom community.
The new Professional Spanish minor offers a gateway course focused on intensive writing and advanced conversation skills, and comprises 20 credit hours distributed in 2 years, with an internship as a capstone (Table 3)  The insertion of UIC colloquial vocabulary items (Potowski K., Parada, Megan-Short, 2012) in the placement exam, allowed to start identifying HS speakers with high command of conversational Spanish, and initially place them in an advanced composition course where their oral fluency is an asset. In this advanced course, HS students are able to hone in their reading and writing skills of the language (responding to an interest expressed in the survey), and profit from their conversational skills while interacting with Spanish L2 learners who, at this point, have developed comparative proficiency skills. Bi-directional scaffolding would come naturally in this course given the more balanced language competencies in both groups. A macrobased teaching focus (Carreira, 2016) in the new minor includes a Community Engaged Learning (CEL) module as part of the class Spanish for the Professions. With this CEL focus, HS students (and nonheritage students in the same class) are able to have a first-hand experience in real-life scenarios using the specialized professional terminology learned in the classroom. Simultaneously, they will be training in soft skills and communication skills, thus responding to the expressed interest for a 'practical' use of their bilingual skills. With the CEL component students also create concrete liaisons with community partners in an environment that is conducive to address social problems or needs. With CEL, students pave the way to a more extensive collaboration in a full internship which is the minor's capstone. In this Spanish for the Professions class, students will also develop an English-Spanish bilingual e-Portfolio, which provides them with distinctive advantage in their upcoming professional placement search. This e-Portfolio naturally integrates technology as a useful element in the professional identity of these young professionals, meets students in the virtual environment that occupies a prominent space in their context as millenials, and adds a versatile edge to their professional profiles.
As a capstone class, the new minor includes a professional internship where community partners act as co-educators providing concrete applications of students specialized knowledge and bilingual skills. In coordination with NCC's Career Development Office for the first time in the history of the college we are developing partnerships with local business and institutions where knowledge of Spanish language is required. In this way, the minor is serving HS to students fulfill academic and professional interests, at the same time than it is breaking grounds opening the path for additional opportunities for diverse populations.
Furthermore, in order to acknowledge the ample variety of fields of study that HS students may have as majors, the new minor also includes a space to add an elective that may be fulfilled through multiple class options. In this way, each HS student is able to progress in the content area that best suits their own interests, while academically validating and advancing their native knowledge of Spanish.
In sum, the combination of the adapted placement exam and the results from the student opinion survey has supported the creation of a new track of studies for HS students in NCC, the Professional Spanish Minor. With this program, HS students will have a space were their native command of the language will be enhanced with academic knowledge of its formal features, and where their solidified Spanish competence will be projected in real-life scenarios in the community. It is expected that in time, the new minor also naturally heightens ethnolinguistic pride in these bilingual students who are eager to move on to a new chapter of the Hispanic identity in the U.S.

Conclusion
The Professional Spanish Minor has been formally approved by NCC to start running in the Fall of 2019. With the initial screening of HS students through the placement test and the wave of interest derived by the opinion survey, it is expected that a first cohort of about a dozen students enroll in the minor. However, there is still a number of challenges that the faculty and the institution will face in the mid-term: In terms of classroom differentiation, Faculty in charge of the gateway course will still meet a highly diverse course in terms of competency levels. Although the modified placement exam closed the competency gap previously registered in lower level-mixed courses, the HS students registered in this class exhibit themselves multiple levels of oral fluency and diverse dialectological traits. Thus, the multiple challenges in terms of class management strategies and evaluation criteria constitute a permanent professional development theme for Faculty. An additional instance where the program will be logistically challenged is the administrative and mentorship roles inherent to the internship component. While NCC's Career Development Office has gladly come forward to look for placements for these bilingual students, questions regarding Faculty load and supervising roles have yet to be explored within the existing resources.
However, even considering these challenges, the new Professional Spanish Minor is a promising path to offering academic and professional validation to Heritage Spanish students. The journey conducive to the opening of this new track of studies has revealed critical aspects of whether our institutions are responding to new generations of Spanish speakers. Taking the case of this small-scale study in a liberal arts college in the Midwest as a point of departure for further national dialogue, it is evident that the expectations of these increasing HS student cohorts are usually not being met by the status quo of most programs. The poll in NCC revealed that students were claiming for specific spaces where they could profit from their bilingualism as a practical and professional oriented asset, in contrast to what programs traditionally consider could be appealing academic options. The inclusion of Community Engaged Learning and the internship maintain the focus of the new minor in NCC within concrete professional applications, hopefully attracting HS students from all backgrounds into our Spanish program. And while the staffing resources and methodological training for instructors of mixed classes are still unresolved questions, the new Professional Spanish Minor is certainly a new assertive step in the right direction to meet HS students at the core of their ethnolinguistic pride, validate it with a solid academic background, and reinforce the fact that "Saber español sí sirve."