UC Santa Barbara

Sociolinguistic approaches have become increasingly popular in Spanish language education (SLE) in order to implement curricula and assessment practices that build learners’ communicative competence. With this goal, researchers and educators are tasked with deciding how to represent the massive sociolinguistic diversity that exist in the Spanish-speaking world to learners who come from a range of sociolinguistic backgrounds. These goals precipitate new research on how learners’ embodiment, positionalities, and subjectivities influence the sociolinguistic variation they encounter, how they make sense of that sociolinguistic variation, and the types of sociolinguistic variation they wish to adopt or reject. Such processes are underexplored for L2 Spanish learners, and particularly for L2 Spanish learner of color. This dissertation collects ethnographic interviews from Spanish learners of color in which they recall interactions, discourses, and participation within communities of practice in which they have encountered terms of self-identification (or identity labels) and vocatives (or terms of address). Through an embodied sociolinguistic framework (Bucholtz and Hall, 2016), I examine how learners used their indexical fields – or the range of context-based social meanings attached to linguistic forms – in order to (1) decipher the meanings of identity labels they used or the vocatives they were called, and (2) decide how to integrate these terms into their own linguistic repertoires. For terms of self-identification, I find that learners with the same raciogendered identities may have overlapping and divergent ways that they discursively orient to terms of self-identification in Spanish. Moreover, their choices to adopt or reject particular terms reflect a desire to align with or challenge the discourses of how they are racialized in the Spanish-speaking world to which these terms are – or seem to be – connected. As for terms of address, I find that this intersubjective process requires learners to navigate agency with their native Spanish-speaking interlocuters. Similar to raciogendered labels, learners who were called vocatives that conflicted with their embodiment, positionalities, or subjectivities relied on their English indexical fields to justify the inadequacy they perceived these terms to have. This dissertation demonstrates that learners across proficiency levels sociolinguistic training, and interest in Spanish-speaking cultures continue to face complex processes of understanding how their embodiment is interpreted in Spanish-speaking contexts as well as how to ascribe social meaning to the terms that are used to capture their embodiment. As such, I conclude with a pedagogical intervention that draws upon (auto)ethnography and centers the learner as the expert for gathering and attempting to make sense of the sociolinguistic variation they encounter based on their embodiment.