Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Association (HaLLA)

Presenter: Abby Bajuniemi
Influence of interlocutor on Spanish L2 performance

In many second language/foreign language classrooms, instructors often seem to prefer the path of least resistance when grouping students for activities by allowing students to select their own conversation and activity partners. There has been discussion within the fields of testing and second language acquisition as to whether this is the best, most beneficial approach for students with regard to their learning. Results from various studies that have measured output in a variety of ways (grammar tests, conversation analysis, writing samples, etc.) have been mixed regarding what types of pairings are most successful and/or most conducive to learning. The current work is a case study of one learner's performance on two oral examinations given in the last semester of the two-year foreign language requirement at a large midwestern university and takes a conversation analytic approach to the analysis of the transcripts of the two interactions. The learner performed better with the interlocutor who was more advanced than she was, but in a post-hoc interview, felt more confident about her performance with the interlocutor who was not only the same proficiency as her, but with whom she felt most comfortable in class.

Presenter: Megan Strom
Initial results of Critical Discourse Analysis from Spanish-language print media in the United States: A critical multimodal social semiotic exploration of ideological representations.

In this presentation, I summarize the findings of a Critical Discourse Analysis based on Teun van Dijk's Socio-Cognitive approach (1998, 2008) and Norman Fairclough's Dialectal-Relational approach (2001) that focus on the discursive expression of ideology. The data represent 24 local news articles from two local Spanish-language newspapers: La Prensa and La Conexión Latina. Following three levels of analysis, I deconstruct each article to demonstrate how grammatical structures, context, cognition, and overarching social structures combine to create unique discursive representations of ideology in a rarely-studied medium.

While surface structures suggest ideologies of Latinos as powerful social actors, an in-depth critical analysis explains how these surface structures obfuscate stereotypical ideologies of Latinos as powerless backgrounded observers of social events. I emphasize from these initial findings that there is much more to Spanish-language newspapers than initially meets the eye, and that there is potential for this medium to challenge traditional ideologies in Minnesota.