Lingüística aplicada (pp. 161-189), the highest marks of all those used. The treatment groups’ survey responses demonstrated how the exercise applied to students’ lived experiences, helping them to learn terminology and concepts relevant to their future teaching career. To analyze student responses, I separated these into two groups. Group A was comprised of those students who spoke a Standard Spanish and had a broad Spanish repertoire. Group B was comprised of HL students whose primary communicative code was a non-standard Spanish variety. Individuals in Group A were comfortable speaking Spanish in an academic domain. They exuded a high degree of confidence in class and demonstrated “cognitive learning behavior” by manipulating the linguistic terminology as it pertained to U.S. Spanish varieties. For example, students cited common calques including “mopear” (to mop) and “registrar para una clase” (register for a class) to explain lexical phenomena in the local vernacular. They admitted that “friends” used code-switching as a linguistic characteristic, but many in this group claimed they rarely spoke U.S. Border Spanish, preferring to use a standard variety.
In contrast, students who were in Group B spoke Spanish in the home
environment; yet, much of their educational and social interactions were conducted in English. This second group established two levels of learning through the exercise: (1) the same linguistic meta-language that fluent standard Spanish speakers learned, and (2) new knowledge of the standard variety. Since U.S. Border Spanish was often their unmarked code, Group B readily used examples that were common to their language repertoire. Similar to the first group, Group B employed the exercise to retrieve these vernacular dialect examples, using linguistic terms to explain their occurrences. For
example, some students applied newly acquired meta-language to recall archaisms such as “ansina,” “haiga” and “naiden,” commonly heard in U.S. Border Spanish. Others described lexical variety found in U.S. Border Spanish and recognized they employed code-switching in their speech. Essentially, Group B became more creative in their responses than Group A by using the vernacular variety to demonstrate the lessons being learned. One student in Group B played with language when he wrote an example of intrasentential codeswitching, “Critics say that codeswitching es una falta de inteligencia y que es algo que la gente recurre a falta de knowledge sobre la lengua en la que se desea hablar.” [Critics say that codeswitching is a lack of intelligence and that it is something that people turn to due to lack of knowledge about the language in which they wish to speak.] This creative outlet prompted other students to give examples of vernacular language, which they could now name by applying meta-language. Group B also recognized that at times they did not know the distinction between vernacular and Standard Spanish lexical items. For example, some students were amazed to learn that “troca” (pick-up truck) and “las vistas” (movies) were not acceptable lexical terms in Standard Spanish. When they became aware of these nuances in a supportive learning environment, students willingly opened themselves to learn Standard Spanish lexicon.
This apparently simple set of questions was also taught by means of affect as students shared their experiences through the vernacular dialect. The second question in this set particularly speaks to an affective approach: “¿Por qué se ven estigmatizados algunos dialectos? Dé ejemplos de tales dialectos.” [Why are some dialects considered to be stigmatized? Give examples of such dialects]. Although the question is objective
in tone, it opened the opportunity for students to discuss personal experiences of stigmitization and stratification. In this case, HL learners discussed the relationship between the common vernacular language variety, U.S. Border Spanish, and the standard Spanish expected of them in the academic setting. One student explained, “It helped me by knowing that everything we use is for a reason and has its name.” The reflective nature of the questions placed students at the center of their learning, applying linguistic constructs to their experiences.
Consequently, both groups used four increasingly complex levels of cognitive development found in Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956): knowledge, comprehension,
application and analysis. Group A recalled linguistic features of the dialect, and Group B demonstrated creativity in comparing and contrasting the distinctions between the two dialects. Group A also demonstrated more empathy toward their less fluent classmates as they learned the sociolinguistic concepts through shared reflective practice. One native-Spanish speaker said, “A mi me critican porque tengo un acento marcado en inglés. Ahora me doy cuenta que no debemos juzgarles a los que aplican la alternancia de código con frecuencia porque no somos mejores, solamente somos diferentes. Aquí podemos compartir nuestras experiencias y ayudarnos el uno al otro.” [“They criticize me because I have a marked accent in English. Now I realize that we shouldn’t judge those that use codeswitching because we’re not better, just different. Here we can share our experiences and help each other.”] Thus, Koike’s exercise provided the conduit for students to be both more compassionate toward fellow classmates and to use existing knowledge of U.S. Border Spanish to gain insight into their own language production.