ABSTRACT
Background and purpose: Do heritage language speakers who receive classroom instruction make larger and/or faster learning gains than speakers who do not? This fundamental question remains unanswered (Bowles, 2018; Montrul & Bowles, 2017; Valdés, 2017), and this study begins to address that gap by investigating the effects of instruction on university-level, second-generation Spanish heritage language learners’ (HLLs) writing longitudinally and by comparing them to an uninstructed control group.
Methods: Argumentative texts from 25 Spanish HLLs enrolled in a one-semester, university-level Heritage Spanish class were collected near the beginning and the end of the term. A matched control group of 25 university Spanish heritage speakers not receiving Spanish instruction responded to the same prompts over the same period of time.
Findings: From the time of the first writing prompt to the second, the instructed group improved significantly in fluency, complexity, and lexical sophistication, whereas the uninstructed control had no such changes. Accuracy, lexical density, and lexical diversity remained unchanged for both groups over time, suggesting that instruction did not significantly impact these aspects of writing.
Conclusions: Given that the instructed learners in this study had little prior literacy in Spanish, medium sized effects in three of the six linguistic measures indicates that the writing instruction was effective.
Pedagogical suggestions: Instructors should not expect that HLLs will improve in all areas of writing. Furthermore, they should expect instructional gains to be gradual, especially with learners who have intermediate- or advanced-level proficiency.
