Walk into almost any high school or university world language department and you will face a curious contradiction. On the posters lining the hallways, bilingualism is celebrated as a superpower and marketed to students as an asset that can open many doors. Traditional second-language (L2) learners who are studying Spanish for the first time are often showered with praise as they memorize vocabulary lists and struggle through unfamiliar conjugation charts.But when a heritage speaker (HS), typically a child of immigrants who grew up speaking Spanish at home, walks into that same department, the temperature seems to change. For one, the knowledge they bring to the classroom is rarely viewed as an asset, at least not in the same way. More often than not, their linguistic practices are seen as a collection of “bad habits” that need to be broken so they can eventually be replaced by “better” or “proper” versions. Many instructors fall into this trap because they genuinely believe that they are acting in their students’ best interests. Their intentions are good, but they rarely pause to consider the invisible harm of this linguistic policing.
This double standard directly shapes how HS students perceive themselves. When an educational institution tells a young person that the language they use to connect with family is flawed or inappropriate, it does not motivate them to learn the standard dialect. When the textbooks used in the classroom perpetuate the misconception that Spanish is a foreign language in the US, it does not inspire them to embrace their heritage with pride. And when local Spanish varieties that have developed organically in places like Miami or Orlando are routinely dismissed by instructors and labeled as lazy, sloppy, or ungrammatical, it does not make them want to read classic Spanish literature. All this does is inflict a form of linguistic trauma that invalidates their already vulnerable lived experiences and transforms their cultural and linguistic capital into a perceived academic problem that needs to be corrected. We must also look at the lesson this double standard teaches the L2 students in the room. When they watch their instructor claim to show appreciation of different cultures and values,yet stop a classroom discussion to correct a HS for saying troca or aplicar instead of camioneta or solicitar, it teaches them that local US Spanish varieties are not legitimate (and by extension their speakers aren’t legitimate either). This reinforces the false but unfortunately long-held belief that bilingualism is only acceptable when it is learned in formal environments and that knowledge of grammar rules is more important than authentic communication. Over time, this creates a ripple effect that extends beyond the classroom walls. When we condition students to view US Spanish as inferior, we are participating in a subtle yet serious form of discrimination.
To be sure, the educational landscape looks very different today than it did twenty years ago. With HS students now present in virtually every Spanish class across the country, teachers and administrators areleft to improvise without a clear blueprint. But adopting a new textbook or opening a dedicated heritage section to follow current trends is not the same as knowing what to do once students show up on the first day of class. Because most educators have not had the opportunity to receive the specialized training that this kind of teaching requires, they often default to the same prescriptive ways we have been trying to move past for decades.
The Path Forward
Defenders of the status quo feel very strongly about upholding the norm. They behave as if the integrity of the Spanish language would collapse if they lowered their guard. To these linguistic gatekeepers, not teaching “pure” and “correct” Spanish is a disservice to their students and to their academic duty. In their mission to maintain the perceived “purity” of the language, many instructors claim a moral high ground but do not realize that they are drowning in a sea of contradictions. For example, they police modern US Spanish innovations but seem to forget that the standard they are defending is itself a patchwork of foreign borrowings and simplified vulgar Latin. They forget that the very accent and syntax they use to lecture their classes today would have been branded as lazy and incorrect not too long ago.
Any meaningful shift toward a socially responsible pedagogy must necessarily begin with self-reflection. We ought to be willing to look critically within ourselves and question why we remain so content to treat language as a dead textbook abstraction while fearing it as the living organism that it is. For most, this process will be uncomfortable, mainly because we are simply not used to facing our (linguistic) ideologies. But without taking this step, not only will we not have a clear grasp of what our true purpose in the classroom is, we will also remain blind to the ways that we may continue to perpetuate our biases under the guise of instruction.
Until we stop treating HS students as deficient projects who need constant fixing and start recognizing them as legitimate bilinguals with inherent cultural and linguistic capital, our teaching will remain hollow. To be clear, this does not mean that we should give up on teaching grammar or on correcting students altogether, but rather that we’ve got to break out of the comfort zone that misrepresents language as a neatly bound abstraction and completely ignores the messy ways real people actually talk outside the classroom walls.
We’ve got to break out of the comfort zone that misrepresents language as a neatly bound abstraction and completely ignores the messy ways real people actually talk.
To be honest, I am not sure what the magic formula is, but this much is clear to me: being mindful must be part of it. Mindful of the inherent power dynamics that dictate whose speech carries authority and respect and whose does not. Mindful of the idealized standards we blindly enforce. And last, but not least, mindful of the heavy baggage that lurks behind our red ink. Only when this happens can we transform Spanish language education from a tool of assimilation into a pathway for true bilingualism.
Diego Pascual y Cabo directs the Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Florida. His work examines heritage speaker bilingualism through theoretical and applied lenses. Dedicated to raising critical language awareness, he seeks to dismantle negative ideologies and to champion the linguistic practices of minoritized bilinguals.
