The long-term impact of a sojourn abroad on heritage language learners of Spanish

Abstract

This chapter investigates the retention of the ability to style-shift between the second-person plurals vosotros 1 and ustedes by heritage language learners of Spanish of Mexican descent who returned to the United States after a four-month sojourn in Madrid, Spain. Few studies have examined the impact of study abroad on the development of a heritage language, primarily due to the infancy of this field, and even fewer have examined the development of morphosyntactic features or the long-term effects of study abroad. To account for the long-term impact of immersion on the development of geographically variable features, this chapter investigates the retention of vosotros one year after the heritage speakers' return from study abroad. Additionally, differences between two groups of heritage learners – those who completed the traditional study abroad program and those who completed the service-learning enhanced study abroad program – are explored in terms of the production of vosotros. The use of vosotros was measured via an interview with the researcher and oral discourse completion tasks at the beginning and end of the four-month sojourn and one year after returning to the United States. Although the results show a decrease in the production of vosotros by both groups of speakers, a correlation between the use of vosotros and time spent abroad was found.