Pantallosos: heritage language maintenance in the diaspora

Abstract

Through the analysis of a corpus of 12 testimonies of children who have remained in contact with their heritage languages (HL) in different virtual contexts, this paper analyses the potentials and shortcomings of the aforementioned technological media, as well as the preferences detected. In order to get closer to the network of beliefs that these students hold about their HL, we launched a narrative proposal in which they would portray themselves as learners (in the case of participating in virtual classes), but, especially, as global consumers of networks and channels in these languages. The ultimate aim would be not to overlook these representations, with a view to incorporating them into the training of future teachers in multilingual contexts. The first results point to a preference for face-to-face vs. online teaching, shared television consumption in the family and a prevalence of the telephone as an anchor with their speech community.