Transcollege Clusters

Faculty Coordinators: Agustina Carando (Spanish & Portuguese), Claudia Sanchez-Guitierrez, Kenji Sagae and Margarita Jimenez-Silva; graduate students Sophia Minnillo, Samuel Davidson and Paloma Fernandez-Mira

Our research team is composed of faculty members and graduate students from the College of Letters & Sciences and the School of Education. We share an interest in studying the language features, learning experiences, and teaching practices related to heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States. Heritage speakers are members of a language community who grow up with exposure to the language primarily in home and community contexts, not in academic and institutional contexts. While the field of heritage language studies has flourished over the past twenty years, advances in our knowledge about the challenges facing heritage speakers has often failed to reach practitioners “on the ground” and translate into actual pedagogical innovations, which would impact the students themselves and lead to improved outcomes. Our overarching goal, then, is to not only contribute to inter-college research on heritage Spanish, but also to serve as a forum of stakeholders and, ultimately, a bridge into our community’s bilingual classrooms.