GRAMÁTICA ESPAÑOLA: VARIACIÓN SOCIAL

A sociolinguistic approach to teaching Spanish grammar

Kim Potowski & Naomi L. Shin

Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics

Queens College
Queens, New York
April 6, 2018
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 Linguistic discrimination

People are still far too comfortable denigrating and

mistreating others based on the way they speak (Lippi
Green 2006; Rickford & King 2016)

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 Traditional approaches to teaching grammar

Inadvertently reinforce linguistic discrimination

• Long list of only ‘standard’/prestigious structures

• Little to no mention of sociolinguistic variation.
→ Harmful effects on heritage speakers, who come to feel that they and
their families speak “incorrectly.”
→ Incorrect impression among all students: That grammar forms are used
in a static, homogenous way throughout the world.

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 Grammar courses

An excellent opportunity to examine linguistic discrimination

by studying:

(a) Linguistic variation

(b)The social factors that shape language attitudes

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 HOW do we teach Spanish grammar in a way that…

• Legitimizes students’ dialect features?

• Helps all students appreciate the validity of all varieties?
• Still teaches grammatical terms and concepts expected in these
courses?
– Identify the grammatical subject of this sentence.
– Is this verb in the indicative or subjunctive?
– What is the 1st person singular subject pronoun?

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Our attempt to meet
these goals

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 Authors’ motivation
• Negotiated with the publisher for the lowest possible price for
students.
• Royalties donated to Latino student organizations on each
campus.

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Capítulo 1

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Dialecto vs lengua

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“Te animamos a que pienses como física/físico y no como policía
de tráfico:”

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El registro
El ciclo del prestigio lingüístico

Cómo habla la
Lo que se
gente
enseña en la
socialmente
escuela
prestigiosa

Lo que entra
en los
diccionarios y
libros de
gramática 17
¿Qué factores sociales contribuyen
al prestigio lingüístico?

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Capítulo 2

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 With each variable:
1) Explain the “standard” way it is structured & used
2) Show examples from corpora in which an alternate variant is
used
3) Explain the current distribution and history of this variant
4) Explore people’s attitudes towards the alternate variant/the
people who use it

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Género y número

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Example from corpus

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Los fines del mundo del escritor peruano José Adolph

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El género

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Pronombres sujeto

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Example from corpus:

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“¿Qué tú sabes de eso?”

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Capítulo 3

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Verb conjugations

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El pretérito

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Examples from corpus: preterite

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Regularizations

hablas has hablado

hablaste
hables hayas hablado
hablabas
hablarías habrías hablado
hablaras hubieras hablado
hablarás habrás hablado

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 había ~ habían
“Pídele a una persona hispanohablante (y que no esté en nuestra clase)
que traduzca estas oraciones al español.”

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Capítulo 4

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Posesivos: with pronombres

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Posesivos: with “de”

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Example from corpus

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Sociolinguistic approach: Does it work?

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 Shin & Hudgens Henderson (2017)
• Pre- and post-test designed to measure:
– Knowledge of grammatical structures in Spanish
– Knowledge of linguistic variation
– Attitudes towards linguistic variation

• Results show significant improvement on all measures.

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Based on Shin & Hudgens Henderson 2017

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Based on Shin & Hudgens Henderson 2017

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Based on Shin & Hudgens Henderson 2017

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 Testimonial 1
“Before taking this class, I thought that many students as well as
the teacher were going to judge me because I didn’t know much
about Spanish grammar. I didn’t know anything about direct objects
or code-switching or pronouns, but now with the activities that we did in
class, I learned to distinguish and describe the way I speak. I always
thought my Spanish was bad because I didn’t follow the rules that
were in my high school textbooks or because I used a lot of slang,
but this course taught me that each person learns his/her dialect
of Spanish and we have to respect it. If someone speaks a language
a little differently and doesn’t follow the same rules, that doesn’t mean
they don’t know how to speak the language.”

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 Testimonial 2
“He aprendido que cada dialecto tiene sus propias reglas y patrones.
Que un dialecto suene diferente o raro no significa que el hablante
sea menos inteligente. [Antes de ir a la República Dominicana]
escuché que “el español de allá es muy feo”. Yo lo creí, claro. Lo que
más me ha beneficiado y lo que más me ayudará en mi vida será esa
idea [not judging ways of talking]. He cambiado para no ser
producto de mi sociedad, sino un agente para afectar mi
sociedad.”

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 Conclusion

Growth in grammatical knowledge

Significant changes of ideology

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 THANK YOU
Kim Potowski & Naomi L. Shin

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