THE PERSONAL ESSAY AND ACADEMIC WRITING PROFICIENCY IN SPANISH HERITAGE LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Traditionally, Spanish Heritage Language (HL) university courses focus on
developing advanced literacy skills in order to equip students with broader writing
repertoires as a way of complementing the level of Spanish oral command that
they already bring into the classroom. Building on the fundamental
interconnectedness of language use and the social context, previous research has
used Systemic Functional Linguistics (Colombi, 2003, 2006) as well as other
explicit writing strategies (Potowski, 2010) as tools for the development of
academic writing. These have been used to analyze and teach a variety of
common academic genres such as reports, critical analyses, and the expository
and argumentative essay in the Spanish HL classroom. Little work has been done,
however, to analyze the academic role of the personal essay as a functional
component of courses for HL speakers at the university level. SLA researchers
such as Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) have advocated for the use of ‘first-person
narratives’ as a legitimate complement to more observational/experimental and
traditional research methodologies. They indirectly echo what psychology scholar
Pennebaker (1990, 2004) calls the ‘reconstruction of self,’ that is, the
reconstruction through writing of life experiences that represent some level of
significance to the language learner, who is, above all, deeply situated in social
activity. Drawing on Gee’s Discourse Theory (1999) and other scholarly research
in New Literacy Studies, this paper suggests that the functional incorporation of
journaling and the personal essay as academic practices can inform the teaching
of advanced literacy in the HL classroom. The article brings into the foreground
the concept of advanced literacy not as merely the mastery of traditional academic
registers, but also as a reconstructive social tool necessary for the incorporation of
the HL voice, which I suggest is crucial in heritage language development.