The College Board

    In 1993 I had just returned from a year in Japan, where I taught English to sophomores and juniors as a post-graduate fellow at Kyoto’s Doshisha University. Upon returning to Miami I knew that I wanted to continue teaching, and I soon found a job teaching four levels of Japanese And one class of Spanish level 1 for Spanish Speakers. 

    Having been born in Nicaragua, I figured teaching Spanish would be a piece of cake, while my Japanese classes would be a challenge. After the first day of class, however, I realized I was way in over my head…with my Spanish class! How could this be? Shouldn’t a native speaker be the ideal teacher for this course? About a week later, I begged my department chair to let me teach Spanish 1 for non-speakers – I could explain the difference between ser and estar much better than I could explain accent rules in Spanish.

    When I was nine years old my family left Nicaragua, and what was to be a short vacation to the United States quickly turned into a new life, filled with the challenges of a new culture, a new school, new friends and, above all, a new language. I was lucky enough to have the support of friends and family, and my assimilation to the United States went relatively well. My parents divorced when I was a teen, and shortly thereafter my mother, my brother and I gradually went from speaking to each other in Spanish at home to speaking to each other only in English. My father, on the other hand, always insisted we speak to him in Spanish, despite the fact that the more time I spent in the United States, the less cooperative my tongue became. 

    It wasn’t until I had been teaching for about ten years that I heard of the “Kitchen Spanish” phenomenon. Typical for recent immigrants, many of us maintain our Spanish around the house, while otherwise living in an English dominant world.

    As a result, while many of us can still order our cafecito and commiserate about the heat, we may struggle to participate in a conversation about the upcoming presidential election. It is clear, however, that there is a need for us to preserve our linguistic and cultural heritage. It is this heritage which makes us better global citizens, capable of easily straddling two cultures and languages not to mention better local citizens and greater assets to our communities.

    One of the best ways in which we can maintain the gift of bilingualism is by continuing to improve our skills in our heritage language. It is not enough for us to communicate in our kitchens. We must refine our knowledge and remind ourselves that language learning, even for heritage and native speakers, is a never-ending process.

    Across the country, there are thousands of schools that offer Advanced Placement Spanish Language and Literature courses not only to English-dominant students, but also to heritage speakers of the language. In 2011 the College Board administered over 130,000 Spanish Language exams across the United States and abroad, and of those, more than 80,000 students indicated that they had extensive exposure to the language outside of the classroom, such as living in a Spanish-speaking country or speaking the language at home. 

    We have seen the numbers of such examinees grow by leaps and bounds in the last few years, as more of us realize the importance of maintaining our language skills in a country that increasingly values linguistic versatility. Maintaining our language takes effort and time, but let’s not forget that it is also part of investing in ourselves. By encouraging our youth to maintain or improve their skills in Spanish, we are indeed investing in the future of the Latino community as a whole.