Symbolic Competence as a Means of Empowering Heritage Spanish Learners as Language Mediators

Abstract

Better addressing the needs of minoritizied populations entails more equitably serving heritage language learners and promoting multilingualism in the United States. Empowering these individuals involves fortifying their connection to panethnic and ethnic identity, agency, linguistic confidence, and expanding their bilingual range (Valdés, 1995; Aparicio, 1997). To that end, a number of scholars and educators have argued over the years that supporting these learners’ biliteracy development should be fostered by educational institutions. Symbolic competence, a concept proposed by Kramsch (2011) provides an alternative to common ways heritage language learning goals have been defined (Valdés, 1995; Beaudrie et al., 2014), by approaching language learning as a way to frame and shape learners’ positions in the “multilingual game” (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 667). Symbolic competence is the ability to understand and use meaning making resources like linguistic code and images to make change in understandings, discourses, and reality. Students are depicted as “not just communicators and problem solvers, but whole persons with hearts, bodies, and minds, with memories, fantasies, loyalties, identities” (Kramsch, 2006, p. 251). Therefore, language use is not purely instrumental, but it relates to the emotion, embodied experience and moral imagining.This project considers how to integrate symbolic competence into heritage language teaching at the curricular level for heritage language learners, by investigating a course development project implemented in a university-level Spanish translation class. I posit that by centering symbolic competence, as a pedagogical goal, language educators can design curricula that foster learners’ ability to use the language in not only appropriate, but in more creative, and transformative ways. Inspired by multiliteracies pedagogies in language education (New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 2009a, 2016; Paesani, Allen & Dupuy, 2015) the course projects ask students to design meanings across languages and modalities and encouraged them to reflect on the symbolic dimensions of their choices. The analysis showed that the curriculum encouraged students to reflect on symbolic dimensions form-meaning connections and how those are embedded in the conceptualization of larger discourses. Translation plays a role in promoting the understanding of form-meaning connections as the translator is faced with a myriad of choices in the act of translating. More specificallly, it helps students circumvent the common pitfall in which beginner students translate word-for-word (Colina, 2002; Belpoliti & Plascencia-Vela, 2013) and, instead, engage in meaning making beyond linguistic code. To scaffold the decision-making process, reflection was incorporated constantly and systematically. However, learners struggled with the realizing particular genres (i.e, a narrative). This study suggests that HLLs bring different types of symbolic competence to the classroom, which can be promoted through curricula that allow students to explore multilingualism and multimodality and need more support in other areas neglected in other traditional curricula.