Internal linguistic discrimination: A survey of bilingual teachers’ language attitudes toward their heritage students’ Spanish

Abstract

This study examined the presence of internal linguistic discrimination -i.e., the negative reaction of Spanish speakers towards the varieties of Spanish spoken by heritage speakers- among bilingual teachers in a school district in Texas. To this end, we conducted a study that analyzed the responses of 84 bilingual teachers to audio utterances reflecting specific linguistic features of Spanish varieties of the United States. Results showed that most of the bilingual teachers who participated in this study expressed negative reactions towards utterances that contained linguistic features (i.e., code-switching, overt pronouns) that characterize U.S. varieties of Spanish. Implications for the preparation of bilingual teachers are discussed here.