The Fl Neur Abroad

Heritage Speakers of Spanish and Study Abroad is an edited volume that provides emerging research on heritage speakers of Spanish in immersion contexts in theoretical, empirical, and programmatic terms. This edited collection seeks to expand our understanding of heritage speakers of Spanish by incorporating research on their linguistic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic development during and after a sojourn abroad, by discussing the complexities of their identity formation and negotiation during immersive stays, and by highlighting programmatic innovations that could be leveraged to better serve diverse learners in study abroad contexts. This volume advances the fields of both heritage language education and research on immersion study in a variety of ways, and will be of interest to scholars of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and educational linguistics, especially those interested in study abroad programming and Spanish for heritage speakers.

This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform layout and methodology. Each chapter contains a study examining factors such as memory, personality, self-concept, bilingualism and multilingualism, education, musicality or gender. The chapters investigate the influence of these concepts on language learning aptitude and ability. Several of these chapters analyse hypotheses which have never been tested before and therefore provide novel research results. The book contributes to the field both by verifying and contesting existent findings and by exploring novel approaches to devising research in the subject area.