SPAN 345
This course will first explore the nature of bilingualism, focusing on its neurolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and linguistic aspects. Students will examine the most important concepts and research questions in these areas. In addition, the class will focus on bilingualism in the United States and the Spanish-speaking world, including the examination of bilingual education programs (e.g., immersion programs) and important political matters connected to them.
Meets MLO 2
Meets MLO 2
Reflective Narrative
In SPAN 345, I was able to explore and understand my identity as a bilingual person in the United States. During this course, I had the opportunity to study the experiences of people who, like me, speak more than one language. We started the semester clarifying the definitions of a bilingual person, where I understood that to be considered one, you don't necessarily have to speak both languages perfectly. With these new definitions, we discussed the instances where people who do not speak the majority language of the region where they live can understand what is being communicated to them. With this and other examples, I realized that society judges and forms negative opinions of bilinguals whose first language is the minority language, without taking into account that their social life is affected by the language they decide to speak, whether they speak the minority language, the majority language, or variations of both. After redefining what it means to be bilingual, I learned about the bilingual brain and how it works when it has a much larger linguistic catalog at its disposal. I was so fascinated with everything that Dr. Rebecca Pozzi was teaching me that I decided to do my presentation on sequential bilinguals, since I’m one of them because I learned English at the age of 14. This presentation taught me a lot about myself and the language practices I perform. One of the most interesting things I learned was about the systems of oppression that work against people whose languages became minority languages after being displaced by a language that was imposed on them. Such was the case with Spain and Latin America, whose native languages were displaced by Spanish. Thanks to our guest speaker Dr. David Vila Dieguez, I now acknowledge the political situation these places are going through with their languages, in this case with Spain, and the conservation problems that have caused the loss of many of them. After studying what is happening over there, I recognized that we are experiencing the same issues in the United States when it comes to immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries and their descendants. Building on this idea, I decided to do my final paper on the bilingual profile of the Salinas Valley. The purpose of this paper is to point out the failures in the educational system that do not recognize the linguistic contexts of the inhabitants of the area. My goal is to raise awareness about this issue and seek solutions that will allow immigrants and their descendants to preserve their mother tongue.