“Broken Arabic” and Ideologies of Completeness: Contextualizing the Category of Native and Heritage Speaker in the University Arabic Classroom
Abstract
Through weekly participant observations and eleven semi-structured interviews conducted with second-generation bilingual students in the Arabic for Native Speakers/Heritage Learners course at one of City University of New York’s (CUNY) senior colleges, I investigate the interdiscursive connections between the students’ notion of “broken Arabic” and the concept of “incomplete acquisition and/or attrition” (Montrul, 2013) from SLA research on heritage speakers. This paper moves away from the concept of proficiency towards performativity in order to recognize and support diverse repertoires in motion.
Keywords
heritage language, Arabic sociolinguistics, incomplete acquisition, linguistic anthropologyReferences
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