Description

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association states that bilingual speech-language pathologists (SLPs) must have “native or near-native” proficiency in both of their languages to practice bilingually. Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish, a group well-represented among bilingual SLPs, may be hesitant to label their Spanish proficiency as “native” or “near-native” even if they are proficient in Spanish. The current study will examine factors that may influence a Spanish-English bilingual speaker's perception of their language proficiency. We hypothesized that objective skills are predictive of self-reported proficiencies and confidence levels and that variables capturing exposure to Spanish predict confidence levels for heritage speakers. Finally, we anticipated that students would not be fully comfortable referring to their proficiency as "perfect or excellent." Methods: Self-report data from 97 heritage speakers were analyzed. Variables of interest included exposure to Spanish through family and friends, learning Spanish from family and friends, classroom instruction in Spanish, months living in a Spanish speaking country, as well as objective vocabulary knowledge scores in Spanish and English. Results: Results showed that greater Spanish vocabulary knowledge was predictive of higher perceived Spanish proficiency, although the effect size suggested that perceived proficiency is also driven by other unaccounted for factors. Further, analyses showed that a broader social environment, specifically exposure to and learning from Spanish-speaking friends, was predictive of perceived Spanish proficiency. Exposure and learning from family was a weaker predictor and classroom exposure was not found to significantly influence self-reported Spanish proficiency. Across the group of heritage speakers, only 23.3% were comfortable rating their Spanish proficiency as “perfect” and 31.6% were comfortable rating their Spanish proficiency as “excellent”, confirming that heritage speakers who are fluent in Spanish are often critical of their own Spanish proficiency. Speakers with “perfect” or “excellent” ratings were observed to have higher exposure to Spanish from family than those with lower ratings. In conclusion, a larger language community, in particular Spanish-speaking friends, may influence self- reported proficiency for Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers.