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Introduction

The Hispanic population in the United States constitutes the largest growing minority in the country (United States Census Bureau 2011), and the presence of Spanish heritage language learners (SHLLs) can be seen more and more in second language (L2) Spanish university classes across the country (Montrul 2010). Instructors in charge of these classes are often faced with two important challenges. The first one is the need to provide heritage students with instruction that can address their needs, which are often different from those of L2 students. The second one involves the often limited financial resources available to heritage students to defray their university education (Lukes 2015). In places such as Northern California, where much of the Hispanic population comes from rural, low-income communities, access to pedagogical resources becomes a key factor in student success, and limited financial resources often result in limited access to instructional materials. This is the reality that instructors often face in Hispanic-serving universities where low-income heritage populations , with very specific linguistic and literacy needs, constitute a significant percentage of the student body. The inspiration for the project described in this chapter arises out of not only the author’s work with this kind of student population, but also her interest in improving these learners’ academic success rates.

The specific context of this project is a Northern California Hispanic-serving institution , as classified by the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.Footnote 1 This project had two main objectives. The first one was to materialize the latest research findings in multiliteracies approaches to learning, in particular Learning by Design (Cope and Kalantzis 2009a, b, 2015; Kalantzis and Cope 2010, 2012; Kalantzis et al. 2005, 2016), and heritage language (HL) education (Cummins 2009; Montrul 2010, 2012; Valdés 2006; Zyzik 2016) in the design of open-source, digital material to address the linguistic and cultural needs of low-income heritage university students who wish to increase their HL knowledge. In particular, our goal was to develop instructional resources for the teaching of Spanish as a HL that would allow us to revamp the curriculum of an existing intermediate class for SHLLs. The second objective was to investigate what role this kind of material could play in the development of heritage speakers’ literacy skills and metalinguistic awareness by examining their written production in genre-specific and multimodal texts.

The chapter is divided as follows. In the first section, we introduce the project, describing its geographical and institutional background, and connecting the social and pedagogical aspects that helped us determine why Learning by Design was the most appropriate pedagogical framework in which to ground our work. The second section provides information about the materials and tasks that were designed. The third section introduces the methodology of the study. The next two sections present and discuss the results of the study. The final part of the chapter addresses important pedagogical issues and suggests areas for future research.

Geographical and Institutional Background of the Project

The main pedagogical objective of the present project was to develop theoretically sound, open-source materials to address the linguistic and cultural needs of SHLLs in a Hispanic-serving public university in Northern California. At this institution, 37% of the student body is Hispanic. Almost all of these students have parents who have immigrated to the United States from Mexico, and, therefore, have close ties with the Mexican-American communities in the three closest counties (Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz) that are served by this institution. Many of the communities in these counties are rural, as one of the two main sourcesFootnote 2 of employment in the area is agriculture (and industries related to it, such as packing) (Regional Analysis and Planning Services 2012). Thus, a high percentage of our heritage students comes from households with parents whose main occupation is related to the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. Since most of the agricultural positions are generally low-paid, the annual per capita income in this region is quite low compared to other areas of California. For example, in the 2008–2010 period, “Monterey and San Benito counties had per capita figures of $24,400 and $25,400 [while Santa Cruz] had the highest per capita income in the region at nearly $31,200” (Ibid., 29).

As part of the university requirements for graduation, almost all of the institution’s heritage learners with an intermediate level of proficiency in Spanish need to take a Spanish class tailored for SHLLs to complete their language requirement. Until the 2014–2015 academic year, this class was based on its L2 equivalent, and students worked with a textbook that was designed for L2 instruction, but did not take into account SHLLs’ specific needs (see Chap. 1 in this volume). As expected, every semester, in their course evaluations, heritage students in the class voiced their complaints about its content, particularly because they felt they had been asked to buy an expensive textbook that did not address their linguistic needs, did not reflect their bicultural identity, and did not discuss any issues that pertain to their community(ies).

Since the main objective of this class was to strengthen/develop SHLLs’ literacy skills in Spanish, and to fulfill an important academic requirement, we felt a change needed to take place. The institution supported our effort with a grantFootnote 3 to develop materials that would address the linguistic and cultural needs of our heritage students, and that would also relieve them from the financial cost of purchasing a commercially produced, and academically inadequate, textbook that most of them could not afford. Based on our knowledge of L2 and HL acquisition and pedagogy, and our experience working with Spanish heritage students at our institution, we chose to develop open-source digital instructional resources under the tenets of the Learning by Design pedagogy.

There were three main reasons why we felt this framework was the most appropriate. First of all, it had been successfully incorporated in the Australian educational context for the teaching of language to minority learners with similar socioeconomic backgrounds to our students (e.g., Hepple et al. 2014; Mills 2010). Second, we felt that the pedagogy’s emphasis on the individual needs of students, and on the crucial connection between the learners’ “experiential world (lifeworld) [and] the formal learning [of which they would be part]” (Kalantzis et al. 2005, 37) would allow us to develop material that would reflect our students’ realities and with which they would be able to connect. The third reason was connected to Learning by Design ’s rejection of traditional views of “literacy,” for the more current and realistic “multiliteracies ,” which reflects (1) “the variability of conventions of meaning in different cultural, social or domain-specific situations” (Kalantzis et al. 2016, 1) and (2) the multimodal nature of modern communication and meaning making (e.g., video, audio, visual, printed, etc.). That is, even though the main objective of our class was the development of our students’ literacy skills in the academic register, we also felt the need to provide our learners with a comprehensive instructional environment that would nurture their use of Spanish in other registers (tying their language use to their community and lifeworld), and in different multimodal forms of communication. And Learning by Design gave us the tools to do so. In sum, we felt that the framework would offer us the theory and methodology to create instructional resources that would result in a safe, transformational learning space where our learners would be able to “express themselves [in their HL] through multiple modes, connect with others and communicate their understandings and think critically about who they are and how they want to project themselves” (Hughes 2015, 202).

Instructional Materials for Spanish Heritage Learners

When planning the development of our material, we considered the demographic information we introduced in the previous section, and we decided that the main thematic focus of the project needed to be the Mexican-American experience in the United States. This theme was divided into issues connected to important social aspects in the life of the members of this group and of our students. Thus, our content centered on four main themes: (1) immigration (la inmigración); (2) labor (el trabajo), with an emphasis on agriculture; (3) family and cultural traditions (la familia y las tradiciones culturales); and (4) my bilingual and bicultural identity (mi identidad bilingüe y bicultural). The treatment of each topic was conveyed through multimodal digital ensembles Footnote 4 that included the following: works of fiction and non-fiction belonging to different genres, websites, works of art, video interviews with members of the local Mexican-American communities , and clips from the open-source PBS documentary Latino Americans and other relevant documentaries, among others.

The four modules included materials to be taught during one semester (the class met twice a week for 110 minutes per session), and approximately four weeks of instruction were devoted to each of them. The new curriculum was first implemented in the Spring 2016 semester, and the class was taught by the author of this chapter (who was also the materials’ developer). Students’ in-depth exploration of the ensembles included in each module was achieved through activities that were designed to represent each of the four knowledge processes in the Learning by Design pedagogical model : experiencing the known and the new, conceptualizing by naming and with theory, analyzing functionally and critically, and applying appropriately and creatively (Cope and Kalantzis 2015; Kalantzis and Cope 2010, 2012; Kalantzis et al. 2005, 2016).

Accordingly, the instructional resources developed allowed students to do the following: (1) reflect on their knowledge of a particular topic and be exposed to new perspectives on it; (2) conceptualize essential aspects of the content and formulate connections to concepts and theory; (3) analyze and understand linguistic and discursive aspects from a functional (how meaning is expressed) perspective and critically examine what perspectives, interests, and motives were presented in each ensemble ; and (4) apply their new knowledge appropriately in related academic (e.g., producing a similar text on a different topic) and/or real-life tasks, and creatively, in the development of innovative, multimodal—and thus, hybrid—projects (e.g., a digital comic book to explore the topic of their bilingual/bicultural identity). All the material related to each topic was interrelated thematically and instructionally. The resources created were open source, and students could access each instructional module (based on each of the four themes discussed in the previous paragraph), first through the university’s learning platform, and in later semesters, through Digital Commons.Footnote 5

In the next sections, we present a detailed description and samples of the materials in the first module, “Immigration” (La inmigración), connecting them to each of the knowledge processes in the Learning by Design pedagogy (Cope and Kalantzis 2015; Kalantzis and Cope 2010, 2012; Kalantzis et al. 2005, 2016). This module was organized around the narrative genre and was based on the following instructional resources: (1) literary works (a short story and poems) by Latino writers, (2) art, and (3) comic strips.

Experiencing the Known and the New

The first knowledge process in the Learning by Design modelFootnote 6 provides learners with the opportunity to connect with a particular topic related to their life experience, drawing from what they know about it, and then exposing them to a new perspective on it. Thus, in the first stage of this process, experiencing the known, “learners reflect on their own experiences, interests and perspectives—for example, bring in, show or talk about something/somewhere familiar” (Kalantzis and Cope 2010, 208). Once students’ knowledge has been activated, they can move to the unknown: They “observe or take part in the unfamiliar; they are immersed in new situations or contexts” (Ibid., 208). This is what Kalantzis and Cope (2012; Cope and Kalantzis 2013, 2015) call experiencing the new. In our project, to first immerse students in the theme of immigration, we asked them to think about three emotions that could illustrate their feelings about their own or their family’s immigration experience, and to reflect on the historical events or social circumstances to which those feelings might be related (see Appendix 1). Learners were expected to submit their answers in textboxes provided on the digital learning platform , and these later became the point of departure for the introduction of the “new.” The objective of this activity was to activate students’ knowledge, perspectives, and reflection on an experience that is common to Spanish-speaking members of their community, and is related to their bilingual/bicultural identity. We also wanted to bring different personal experiences to the forefront in order to emphasize how the same issue could be perceived in various ways.

Learners’ work in the experiencing the known phase set the stage for the introduction of a new perspective on immigration, that of well-known Latino author Francisco Jiménez (2000), who, in his book Cajas de cartón (The Circuit), describes his experiences as a child of Mexican undocumented migrant workers in California. Jiménez narrates his immigration experience in one of the book’s stories, Bajo la alambrada (Under the Wire). We chose to introduce a new perspective on immigration through this story because of the geographical, historical, and social connections between the author and our students. In addition, this text was an excellent example of the narrative genre, and it served as the sample text to explore the structural and linguistic aspects of that genre. In this experiencing the new stage, learners were asked to read Jiménez’s story and to complete the following activities (see samples in Appendix 1):

  1. 1.

    Find similarities, if any, between their own immigration experiences (knowledge from experiencing the known) and the ones presented in the story.

  2. 2.

    Analyze the title of the story in connection to its content, focusing on the historical and social symbolism of la alambrada (the wire).

  3. 3.

    Understand the events in the narration (focus on meaning: what the story is about, who the characters are, what events are presented, etc.)

  4. 4.

    Understand the author’s emotions and rationale behind the story. For this activity, students were required to work in groups to create digital spider maps representing links between emotions, characters, and events, which they would afterwards post on the learning platform site for the class.

Conceptualizing by Naming and with Theory

Once students had achieved a deep understanding of the events, the emotions, and the immigration perspective presented in Jiménez’s (2000) narrative, they were ready to move to the next two stages of their learning process: conceptualizing by naming and conceptualizing with theory. These two processes guide learners’ attention to the design elements of a particular text (e.g., the organization and classification of information), and they “connect concepts to explain how a kind of text works to make meaning, in general terms” (Kalantzis and Cope 2012, Kindle location 7403). In our immigration module materials , our students went back to Jiménez’s story, but now they were asked to concentrate on how the information in the text was organized, and on the reason why this was the case (Appendix 2). First, they tried to determine what kind of information was provided in different sections of the text, answering specific guiding questions. Once they had completed this activity, they needed to work in groups to create a digital conceptual map illustrating how the different parts of the text were supported by main ideas and concepts, by establishing the connections used to convey certain messages (Appendix 2). Our goal for these activities was to support our students’ exploration of the structure of a sample narrative piece so that they could begin to understand how the genre works and what meanings can be conveyed through its use.

The guided reconstruction of the structure of Jiménez’s (2000) text, and the analysis of the social reasons why it was organized in that way prepared learners to concentrate on a more general definition of a narrative. That is, through this work, students were able to move from the particular characteristics of a sample narrative to the more general rhetorical properties of that genre. The final step was then to conceptualize with theory, providing a definition of a narrative in general terms (last activity in Appendix 2).

Analyzing Functionally and Critically

The conceptualizing activities helped learners understand how a narrative was organized and how events had to be structured in order to convey certain meanings. In the analyzing stages, the focus continued to be on the narrative, but now we moved to the linguistic resources to which we can resort to narrate a story (e.g., verb tenses, clausal elements, etc.). In addition, in this phase, we also concentrate on the “evaluation of the perspectives, interests and motives of those involved in knowledge making, cultural creation or communication, [and] learners interrogate the interest behind a meaning or an action” (Kalantzis and Cope 2010, 209). The analyzing activities allow for synesthesia (see Chap. 1 in this volume), as we can expose students to ensembles in other modes, we can explore the means by which meaning is expressed in those modes, and we can establish links among different perspectives.

In Spanish, the narrative genre usually involves the use of two past tenses, the preterite and the imperfect. Even though SHLLs with an intermediate level of proficiency can generally use these tenses without problems, which applied to our students, they do not have any metalinguistic understanding of how they work, and what kinds of meanings are expressed by each of them. Therefore, the analyzing by function activities in our immigration module required students to concentrate on the use of these two tenses, focusing first on the kind of meaning they conveyed in Jiménez’s (2000) text, and later articulating more general rules for their use in narratives (Appendix 3). In addition, similar activities addressed some of the spelling difficulties that SHLLs face due to the lack of formal instruction in Spanish. However, even for orthographic content, meaning and guided analysis were always the departure points (Appendix 3).

In instructional material in the next stage, analyzing critically, students make use of their interpretive and inferential skills as well as their social knowledge. In this phase, learners look critically at both their own and others’ perspectives to try to understand the social purpose behind them. In our immigration module, we provided questions for reflection on Jiménez’s (2000) emotions and motives, and we connected students to three different kinds of ensembles produced by Mexican-Americans that dealt with the topic of immigration but in different ways (in terms of mode, but also emotions and tone). These resources were (1) two poems by Gina Valdés (1996), (2) the painting Me hechan de mojado by Malaquías Montoya (2014), and (3) a comic strip by Lalo Alcaraz (2004). The instructional material that we developed focused on the guided comparison of Jiménez’s narrative and these three ensembles , with questions on the similarities and differences between the messages conveyed in all the works. In addition, students were expected to concentrate on the resources (e.g., organization of ideas, color, foregrounding, expressions, etc.) that were used by the writers and artists to narrate their word and visual stories. These activities (see samples in Appendix 4) served several purposes: (1) they exposed students to other ways of expressing similar messages; (2) they allowed learners to work with and understand the non-linguistic means used in visual communication; and (3) they established connections between their personal experiences and those expressed by other members of the Mexican-American community.

Applying Appropriately and Creatively

The final two knowledge processes in the Learning by Design pedagogy involve learners’ application of their new knowledge in the production of tasks. In the applying appropriately phase, for example, students can create a text that belongs to the same genre with which they have worked, and contains the required elements pertaining to that genre (Kalantzis and Cope 2012). Applying creatively activities are more innovative, and they “involve a more distant transfer of knowledge from its original setting to a different context” (Kalantzis and Cope 2010, 209). In our immigration module, we first required our students to produce a narrative in which they wrote about their personal immigration story or that of a member of their family/community (applying appropriately). Our second task consisted of our students’ production of a hybrid, multimodal narrative (applying creatively), containing text, and visual content, such as video and/or photos, that represented the events and emotions presented in Jiménez’s (2000) or another person’s immigration story. Students developed this project in the digital platform Glogster (http://edu.glogster.com), and it was accompanied by a reflection that explained the connection between the different elements in their work, and their view of the tasks (the two narratives). The three products—the written and visual narratives and the reflection—became part of the e-Portfolio each learner was expected to develop for the class, and they also constitute the data for our study (which will be presented in the next section of this chapter).

Even though all the activities in the course could be completed digitally, we also incorporated face-to-face classroom discussions and conferencing as part of our instruction. In addition, students received online support in the form of comments or answers to the specific questions they could post on the class’s digital bulletin board. Peer collaboration was expected and fostered, and it took the form of face-to-face interactions, and/or synchronous (via Google Hangouts) and asynchronous discussions. Assessment focused on the e-Portfolios that students developed, which showcased their creativity and the development of their literacy skills.

The next step in our project was the examination of the effects of the instructional materials on the development of our learners’ literacy skills and their metalinguistic awareness . In the next section, we present the study we conducted. Even though we collected data throughout the semester, in this chapter, we will only focus on the results of students’ work with the narrative genre, which was based on the materials and tasks discussed in this section.

The Study

Objective and Participants

The main objective of the study was to investigate the role that multiliteracies-based instructional materials , guided by the tenets of the Learning by Design pedagogy , can play in the development of SHLL’s literacy skills and metalinguistic awareness . Twenty-nine SHLLs participated in this study (23 females and 6 males). They had all been exposed to Spanish since birth, and all of them, except for three, had been born in the United States. The participants had received their formal education only in English, and none of them had studied Spanish formally (the study’s class was the first formal class they had taken in Spanish), except for one participant, who had emigrated to the United States at age 10 and had been schooled solely in Spanish until then. Seventeen students (59%) came from monolingual Spanish-speaking households (their parents were monolingual), while 12 (41%) had bilingual parents, but Spanish was the language at home. The majority of participants (85%) came from low-income households, and lived with their parents in neighboring towns (Seaside and Salinas). All participants had very positive attitudes toward Spanish, and they expressed their desire to improve it.

The participants’ proficiency at the beginning of the study was assessed in two ways: (1) through an abridged DELE exam with 50 multiple-choice vocabulary and grammar questions (National Heritage Language Resource Center 2015), which had been used in previous studies with heritage learners; and (2) through a scale that learners used to self-evaluate their overall proficiency in Spanish as well as in reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The results of the DELE exam showed that 4 students performed at the highest level within the low-level range (28–29 points), 11 students performed at the intermediate level, and 14 at the advanced level, which suggests a general intermediate-advanced level of proficiency.

The self-evaluation form included five values: The highest (native-like) was 5, and it was followed by 4 (very good), 3 (good), 2 (needs improvement), and 1 (poor). The results of the participants’ self-evaluation (Table 3.1) show that the overall proficiency was classified as “good,” with a mean value of 3.7, and a median of 4. Among the individual skills, the highest numbers were found in the listening and speaking areas, with means of 4.3 and 3.5 respectively. As expected, due to our participants’ lack of formal schooling in Spanish, the lowest categories were reading and writing, with mean values of 3.3 and 2.5 respectively, and the highest standard deviation measures among the five categories.

Table 3.1 Results of SHLLs’ self-evaluation of their Spanish proficiency
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Instruments

Before the beginning of the narrative unit and at the end of it, participants completed two online questionnaires (administered through Google Forms) that probed into their knowledge of the topics included in the unit: (1) what a narrative is, (2) accent rules (the difference between palabras agudas and esdrújulas), and (3) the difference between the preterite and imperfect. The results from the questionnaires before and after instruction became the first sources of data for this study.

Other sources were the two versions of the narratives written by the participants—their first draft and the final version, revised and edited based on their classmates’ and instructor’s feedback—and the learners’ reflections on the task and any changes that they may have noticed with respect to their knowledge and use of Spanish. In addition, we also analyzed the hybrid projects developed by the students in terms of the cohesiveness and clarity of the message expressed, and the presence of all the required multimodal elements, and we took into account our learners’ views on this project as well.

Results

Questionnaires

Part 1: ¿Qué es una narración? (What Is a Narrative?)

When this question was administered to the participants before the instructional unit, 20 of them provided vague or partially correct definitions, and 9 students either expressed their lack of knowledge or gave incorrect answers. After the instructional unit, only 1 student gave an incorrect definition. The following examples illustrate the changes that manifested in two different participants’ answers after instruction:

Example 1:

Definition pre-instruction: No sé. (I don’t know.)

Definition post-instruction:

Es contar sobre un evento que consiste de emociones, un principio, una descripción, un medio de eventos en el evento general y un final.

(It’s telling [a story] about an event that consists of emotions, a beginning, a description, a middle, with events within the main event, and an ending.)

Example 2:

Definition pre-instruction: Dar detalles de una persona. (Give details about a person.)

Definition post-instruction:

Una historia/cuento ficticio o real. (A fictional or real story/fairy tale.)

Part 2: Orthography

This section consisted of two questions that probed into participants’ knowledge of the rules that govern the accentuation of two types of words, agudas and esdrújulas. These two types of accent patterns were chosen as the instructional focus of this unit because they are associated with verb forms in the preterite and imperfect, which are the most common tenses found in narratives in Spanish. Our objective was, thus, to connect this functional aspect to others characteristic of the narrative genre in our students’ HL. The two questions in the questionnaire included a list of seven words, and students were asked to choose which words among the ones presented were either agudas or esdrújulas. The results before instruction rendered only 2 correct answers among students for palabras agudas and 4 correct ones for palabras esdrújulas. In contrast, after instruction, there were no incorrect answers in either category: All participants answered these questions correctly.

Part 3: Preterite and Imperfect

In this section of the questionnaires, we included examples of the seven uses of the preterite and imperfect that would be discussed in class in association with the narrative genre. Learners were provided with sentences taken from Jiménez’s (2000) story that illustrated those seven uses, and they were asked to determine if the examples were in the preterite or imperfect (the options given were “preterite,” “imperfect,” or “no sé” [I don’t know]). For the preterite, the results before instruction showed that 11 students had chosen correctly, 11 had answered incorrectly, and 7 had expressed their lack of knowledge by choosing “no sé.” In the case of the imperfect, no correct answers were recorded: 22 students chose the incorrect options and 7 answered “no sé.” The results overall in both tenses improved after instruction. However, there were still incorrect answers in both categories. In the preterite, 14 students answered correctly whereas 15 chose the wrong options. In the imperfect, 16 learners selected the correct alternatives, but the remainder did not.

Narratives and Reflections

The first assignment in the written narrative task required students to develop their pieces and to submit their first drafts electronically. These were read first ready by a classmate, who provided comments on content, and then by the instructor. Since it was important to maintain a tight connection between the conceptual and functional aspects of the narratives discussed and produced by our students, when it came to providing learners with feedback on their work, the instructor mostly focused on the rhetorical and linguistic features that had been discussed throughout the unit. Thus, comments centered around issues related to content and to the organization of and connection between ideas and the written pieces’ cohesiveness, the correct use of the preterite and the imperfect, and the application of the learned rules of accentuation to palabras agudas and esdrújulas. However, the instructor also felt the need to offer guidance for learners to work on other linguistic and literacy issues she had noticed, namely, (1) the overuse of subject pronouns, (2) the presence of non-standard vocabulary (e.g., borrowing and/or semantic calques), and (3) the use of capital letters.

Instructor feedback (Fig. 3.1) took mostly the form of comments identifying the incorrect/inappropriate language use (in terms of the genre), and encouraged learners to actively revisit the content that had been discussed in class, or to do more research (e.g., consulting bilingual dictionaries) in order to improve their products. Even though this type of feedback became an extremely time-consuming endeavor, it was seen as essential if transformative learning was to take place. That is, as stated by Neville (2008, 21) “pedagogical practices that simply promote the authorship of… texts do not automatically advance…authentic literacy practices, [as] the development of multimodal literacy requires explicit teaching of strategies for working with the forms, features, and cultural contexts of texts.” In the end, this guidance paid off, as it facilitated students’ revision task of their first draft. Both the first draft and final version that resulted from learners’ revisions were included in their e-portfolios.

Fig. 3.1
figure 1

Sample instructor comments and student revision

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To accompany their narratives, learners were asked to reflect on their writing task, focusing on four main questions: (1) what the easiest part of writing a narrative had been; (2) what the hardest part of writing a narrative had been; (3) what they had learned about their Spanish while completing this task; and (4) whether they felt that their classmates’ and instructor’s comments had been helpful for the writing of the final version and why that had been the case. The answers to these questions were similar among the participants. For example, most learners felt that the easiest aspect of the task had been choosing whose story to tell, while the two most difficult ones had been the use of accents and finding the right word in Spanish (they all felt their vocabulary was too limited). When reflecting on their HL use, most learners mentioned the fact that they had been surprised to see how much more Spanish they knew than they had expected. Some students also became aware of problems with register, since they said that their Spanish was not “appropriate” or “correct,” and they felt they needed to work harder to overcome this weakness. Lastly, all participants praised the comments given by both their classmates and instructor as they believed they had facilitated the revision of their first draft, and had made them see flaws in content that they would have never noticed on their own.

Multimodal Narratives

This task required students to create a multimodal narrative either to mirror the most important emotions and events in Jiménez’s (2000) story or to tell another person’s immigration story. Though most learners chose to focus on the narrative they had read, others decided to focus on some of their family members’ stories, and two students chose to center their work around the immigration experiences of two Mexican-Americans they admired, Dr. Alfredo Quiñones Hinojosa and César Millán . To complete this assignment, learners were expected to work on the digital platform Glogster, combining multimodal ensembles such as text, video, and photos and/or art, which were required, and, if desired, other optional modalities such as sound, music, graphs, and/or links. The resulting products were evaluated for the presence of the required elements, creativity, and cohesiveness and comprehensiveness in terms of the connection among the different multimodal elements. All students in the course completed this work, but not all the projects were at the same level in terms of comprehensiveness and creativity. For example, some projects were missing some of the required elements (e.g., video), and some looked more like simple PowerPoint presentations, with separate elements not connected to other parts. Overall 20 of the 29 participants produced complete works, with two students excelling in the depth of their narratives.

The hybrid narratives were also accompanied by reflections where students were expected to reflect on (1) the creative process behind their work and (2) the linguistic and/or technology challenges that they had encountered, and where they were also asked to express their view on the value of the project as an instructional resource. Overall, the hybrid narrative project was well-liked. However, five students expressed their frustration with Glogster, describing it as not being as user-friendly as they had expected, but also admitting that technology was not their forte, and that their lack of knowledge might have affected this perception. Others confessed they had felt overwhelmed when they had learned about the project since they had never done anything of that nature; however, they also said that the very specific instructions they had received and the examples that had been analyzed in class had facilitated their task. Two students fully embraced the project, developing the most comprehensive narratives and expressing the most positive opinions about it, which might have been connected to whom they were. One of these learners was an Arts majors, and, as expected, was extremely excited to learn she could resort to visual ensembles to tell her story. The other learner was a pre-med student, and she was the most motivated and high-achieving person in the group.

Next, we reflect on the results presented in this section, focusing first on the questionnaires, and then on the written and multimodal narratives.

Discussion

The comparison between the results of the questionnaires before and after our students were exposed to the narrative module seems to suggest some positive instructional effects. First of all, it seems that all participants, except for one—a student who had the lowest level of proficiency in the class—were able to define the concept of narrative accurately and in more depth. For example, 25 out of 28 learners named and described the organizational and content features that characterize this genre in a comprehensive way, resorting to the terminology that had been discussed in class. In addition, students’ work with orthography appears to have resulted in their ability to correctly determine if a word was aguda or esdrújula based on their accentuation pattern. Even though this was a good sign, it is important to notice that, when producing written texts, all learners continued to exhibit random patterns of accentuation with both types of words. Nevertheless, a positive outcome was that, in their reflections, 25 out of 29 students mentioned becoming aware of their difficulties with accents, and expressed the need to continue working on this aspect of their literacy.

The questionnaire findings also point to some improvement in our learners’ ability to distinguish the preterite and the imperfect, with the latter exhibiting the highest rate of accuracy. However, throughout the semester, learners continued struggling with metalinguistic issues not only with reference to these tenses, but also with other grammatical structures discussed in class. Even though Learning by Design allowed us to offer our students very guided and explicit instruction that continuously connected form and use, it seemed that it was difficult for our participants to undertake any metalinguistic analysis and to articulate concepts of this nature. That is, our students were able to apply both the preterite and the imperfect appropriately and accurately, and sometimes they could distinguish between them, but they were not able to explain patterns of use and the types of time/event meanings conveyed by each tense.

When it came to the written narratives produced by students, we noticed clear changes between first drafts and final versions, and this could be connected with the strong support and detailed comments (both from classmates and the instructor) that were offered during the writing process. One of the most noticeable differences was in terms of content. The first versions submitted by most students were shorter than the required length, lacked detail, and contained simple ideas. When learners worked with their classmates on their first drafts (either in-class or online, via Google Hangouts), they were specifically guided (with very detailed instructions and questions) to focus on ways in which their classmates’ narratives could be more interesting. In addition, they were reminded that their job was to give as many suggestions for ideas and modifications as possible, and that they would be graded for the comprehensiveness of their comments. Most participants complied with the instructions given, and, in their reflections, 27 out of 29 students said that their interactions with their partners had facilitated their writing.

Another important, and in a way, unexpected, result from students’ work in the narratives and, perhaps, a consequence of the very detailed, explicit comments given by the instructor, is that some learners developed some kind of metalinguistic awareness , even if it was not connected to the focus of the unit. The grammatical and literacy aspects that were noticed were the overuse of subject pronouns and literacy issues (e.g., capitalization) that the instructor had spotted and commented on in the students’ drafts. And it seems that, through this explicit guidance, learners were able to become metalinguistically aware of them. This is clearly illustrated in the following quotes, expressed by three different students in their reflections:

En esta actividad aprendí por ejemplo que cuando me refiero a alguien no tengo que repetir de quien estoy hablando porque ya lo establecí en el principio. También aprendí que los meses y días de la semanas [sic] no llevan mayúsculas.

(In this activity, I learned, for example, that when I refer to someone, I don’t have to repeat who I’m talking about because I already established this from the beginning. I also learned that months and days of the week are not capitalized [in Spanish].)

Cuando estoy hablando de un hombre, como en mi narración de César, aprendí que no es necesario usar la palabra “él” cuando uno ya ha presentado en su historia a la persona principal.

(When I’m talking about a man, like in my narrative on César, I learned that it is not necessary to use the word “he” when you have introduced that person in your story.)

Yo creo que el aspecto que debo mejorar son las reglas, por ejemplo, cuando no necesito decir “yo” todo el tiempo porque en el principio aclaré que estoy ablando [sic] de mí. Y necesito no usar palabras que son mezcladas con el español y el inglés … No sabía que nomás la primera letra de un título debe ser mayúscula y que la fecha es diferente en español.

(I believe that what I need to improve are the rules, for example, when I don’t need to say “I” all the time because at the beginning [of an idea] I clarified that I’m talking about myself. And I need not to use words that are a mixture of Spanish and English … I didn’t know that [in Spanish] only the first letter in a title is capitalized and that dates are [written] differently in Spanish.)

This new awareness seems to validate the importance that Learning by Design bestows upon explicit instruction when it “engages students in the role of apprentices as they work with the teacher (emphasis added)—who assumes the role of language expert—to develop an understanding of language function” (Kalantzis et al. 2016, 154), through scaffolded (based on detailed, transparent guiding questions), but active analysis, research, and re-construction. It is also important to mention that, for the most part, the students who had noticed the overuse of subject pronouns made a conscious effort to focus on this aspect in subsequent writing assignments, and they made no errors with capitalization. This suggests a possible move from metalinguistic awareness to metalinguistic knowledge, at least in these two areas.

Other characteristics that distinguished first drafts from final versions of the narrative task were more accuracy with the accentuation patterns discussed in class, limited use of subject pronouns in contexts where it was not required, and more complex sentences. In addition, since non-standard vocabulary options had been marked, and students had been explicitly asked to check dictionaries for standard alternatives, there was improvement in the variety of vocabulary included in the final narratives. Also, learners followed instructions to replace expressions that were too colloquial, and they were instructed to search for more formal ones. As a consequence, the register in the final products was more formal than in the drafts.

The hybrid narratives showcased learners’ ability to apply what they had learned about narratives, but in an innovative way. Though, as reported in the results section, not all the products included the required multimodal ensembles , and some of the hybrid narratives lacked cohesion, it was clear that, in some cases, students really connected with their work and developed extremely comprehensive products that could be considered excellent examples of their ability to develop a multimodal ensemble . Participants also reported fully enjoying the creative nature of the project, rejoicing in the creative freedom that had resulted from it:

Las fotos me dieron muchas inspiración para poder mejorar mis ideas. También fue mucho mas [sic] divertido contar una narración con imágenes. Me gusto [sic] mucho el aspecto creativo de esta actividad. La libertad que tenia [sic] para poder usar mi imaginación hizo que este trabajo fuera divertido.

(The photos gave me much inspiration to improve my ideas. Also, it was much more enjoyable to tell a story with images. I liked the creative aspect of this activity very much. The freedom that I had to use my imagination made this project really enjoyable.)

Me encantó que pude crear algo único y narrar mi historia como yo quería.

(I loved the fact that I was able to create something unique and narrate my story in my own way.)

The overall positive results of the narrative module were also mirrored in the other three instructional units, and the class generated very high student evaluations. For example, learners were extremely pleased with the fact that they had not been asked to buy a textbook, and they praised the creative nature of the course. In addition, they felt connected to the focus on the Mexican-American experience , and they believed that the class had either allowed them to re-discover the Mexican aspect of their identity or provided them with a forum to celebrate it. All of our participants also said that the course had helped them understand how to use Spanish in different contexts, and it had improved their problems with accentuation and capitalization. Lastly, at the end of the semester, five of our students became Spanish minors, and one of them started considering this possibility. The following views, expressed by five different students, summarize some of these ideas:

Lo que aprendí sobre mi español a través de esta clase fue que uno tiene que estar orgulloso de ser bilingüe y bicultural. Muchas puertas se abrirán para una persona que pueda hablar y escribir español. Lo que aprendí a través del curso fue que uno nunca termina de aprender algo nuevo de su cultura. También ser orgullosa de lo que mis padres me enseñaron y lo que yo a aprendido [sic] en clase.

(What I learned about my Spanish through this class was that one has to be proud of being bilingual and bicultural. Many doors will open for someone who can speak and write Spanish. What I learned throughout the course is that one never stops to learn about one’s culture. Also, to be proud of what my parents taught me and what I have learned in class.)

Aprendí que mi español ha mejorado más desde que el empiezo [sic] de la clase. También aprendí que creando estos proyectos en español no solamente me ayudó a mejorar mi español pero también me ayuda a aprender mucho de mi cultura. Me gustó mucho poderme expresar en español. Yo nunca quiero parar de aprender el español. Para mí es muy importante seguir valorando todo lo que es ser mexicana.

(I learned that my Spanish has improved since the beginning of this class. I also learned that developing these projects in Spanish not only helped me improve my Spanish, but it also helps to learn a lot about my culture. I really liked to be able to express myself in Spanish. I never want to stop learning Spanish. It’s very important for me to continue valuing everything that means to be Mexican.)

Aprendí demasiado sobre mí porque aprendí que mi cultura hispana es muy fuerte, es una gran parte de mi [sic] y es algo que no me di cuenta esta [sic] presente en mi dia [sic] diario. Como yo se [sic] que soy mexicana pero no lo pienso todo el tiempo y el curso me ayudó a reflejar que sin estar en mi nación natal, estoy en México por parte de mi cultura que mis padres me an [sic] incorporado.

(I learned a lot about myself because I learned that my Hispanic culture is very strong, it’s a big part of me, and it is something that I did not realize is present in my everyday life. It’s like I know I am Mexican, but I don’t think about this all the time, and this course helped me reflect that, without being in my native country, I am in Mexico because of that part of my culture that my parents have given me.)

Yo me miro mejorando mi español en el futuro. Después de estar en esta clase, me gustaría obtener un minor en español, pero vamos a ver si lo puedo lograr por razones financieras. Pero me gustaría leer más en español. Es cierto que uno puede mejorar su español si lee más, como lo hicimos en la clase.

(I can see myself improving my Spanish in the future. After being in this class, I would like to get a minor in Spanish, but we’ll see if I can do this because of financial reasons. But I would like to read more in Spanish. It’s true that you can improve your Spanish if you read more, like we did in this class.)

Este curso hizo que yo considerara sacar una carrera en español. Yo quiero continuar mi aprendizaje para poder hablar el español profesionalmente. Para mí no solo es importante hablar el español con mi familia, si no [sic] que también pienso usar el español en mi profesión, cuando esté trabajando como doctora.

(This course made me consider a degree in Spanish. I want to continue my learning so that I can speak Spanish in my profession. To me, it is not only important to speak Spanish with my family, but I also plan to use Spanish in my profession, when I’m working as a doctor.)

The views presented above and the overall positive results of our students’ work with digital, open-source materials grounded in Learning by Design point to the value of this type of instruction for the teaching of Spanish as a HL. Of course, there are limitations to this work. First of all, this chapter only focused on one instructional module, and thus, the findings reported can only be tied to the implementation of the particular material included in that module. Also, there were a limited number of participants, who already had an intermediate-advanced level of Spanish proficiency, and, since most of them came from monolingual households, this language had a very strong presence in their lives. This situation was also emphasized by the participants’ educational environment, as they were in contact with a large number of Spanish-speaking students because the university was a Hispanic-serving institution. Another important aspect that might have influenced our results was the fact that all of our students had extremely positive views toward the Hispanic part of their identity, and they were very eager to learn more about cultural aspects related to it.

Suggestions for Further Research and Concluding Remarks

The results of this study are promising. However, as explained in the previous section, the limitations posited by the number of participants and the educational environment where it took place point to the need for more research to continue exploring the role that Learning by Design can play in HL teaching. For example, one way we could broaden the scope of this study would be to implement the materials developed with a larger number of students, and in other educational settings where learners might not have the same positive attitudes as our participants. In addition, more quantitative and qualitative measures could be incorporated, such as delayed posttests, interviews with the participants and instructors, and classroom observations. These different sources of data would allow us to consider pedagogical factors that might facilitate or hinder the type of instruction proposed in this chapter and the present volume.

Despite its limitations, this study shows that Learning by Design can provide the theoretical and methodological bases for the establishment of HL education that (1) can be tailored to specific learner needs (both personal and academic), and does not follow a “one-fit-all” model, which would not make any sense when considering the diversity that characterizes heritage learners in the United States (Fairclough and Beaudrie 2016; Zyzik 2016); (2) can nurture and develop what Martínez (2016) defines as SHLLs’ “capabilities,” which tie HL use to specific social contexts and to learners’ communities and lifeworld; and (3) can renew students’ interests and links to their HL, and, as a result, can positively influence learners’ (and the communities to which they belong) commitment to language maintenance. We feel that these goals can be achieved through the blueprint for the needed transformational learning , one to which SHLLs can feel they belong, offered by Learning by Design.