Spanish receptive bilinguals

Understanding the cultural and linguistic profile of learners from three different generations

Sara Beaudrie

The growing amount of research in heritage languages (HL) consistently suggests that HL learners are a diverse population with language abilities that span across the whole spectrum of the bilingual range (Valdés 2001). Receptive bilinguals, sometimes called passive bilinguals, are at one end of this bilingual range, almost at the verge of culminating the language shift towards English monolingualism. This population of HL students has received scant attention from HL programs and researchers alike. The present study fills this gap in the literature by focusing specifically on receptive bilinguals of different generations enrolled in Spanish classes at a large university in the southwestern United States. It seeks to provide insights into their cultural and linguistic profile so as to begin to understand the factors that have influenced their current Spanish use and linguistic abilities in the language.

Keywords: Spanish, language loss, heritage languages, passive bilinguals, language maintenance

Published online: 09 April 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.6.1.06bea

Cited by

Cited by 12 other publications

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DeFeo, Dayna Jean

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2018. Language and (Re)Negotiations of Latinx Identity: Latinx Parents’ Approaches to Spanish and Bilingualism. Social Problems

Goble, Ryan A.

2020. Stancetaking and heritage language production: the untold stories of spoken Spanish among third-generation “receptive” bilinguals. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 17:4 ► pp. 247 ff.

Parada, Maryann

2013. Sibling Variation and Family Language Policy: The Role of Birth Order in the Spanish Proficiency and First Names of Second-Generation Latinos. Journal of Language, Identity & Education 12:5 ► pp. 299 ff.

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2016. Multilingualism and literacy: practices and effects. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 19:2 ► pp. 127 ff.

Sherkina-Lieber, Marina

2020. A classification of receptive bilinguals. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10:3 ► pp. 412 ff.

Torres, Julio, Ricardo Estremera & Sherez Mohamed

2019. THE CONTRIBUTION OF PSYCHOSOCIAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL VARIABLES TO HERITAGE LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE OF SPANISH. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41:04 ► pp. 695 ff.

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