Rachel Showstack

Rachel Showstack
Wichita State University | WSU · Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures

PhD

About

44
Publications
9,061
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306
Citations
Introduction
Rachel Showstack is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Wichita State University. Her research addresses identity and ideology in Spanish heritage language learning, family language policy and language maintenance in Latino families, language in healthcare contexts, and community-based language education. She has published articles in Spanish in Context, Language and Intercultural Communication, the Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, and the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education.
Additional affiliations
August 2013 - present
Wichita State University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)

Publications

Publications (44)
Article
Although digital media projects are not new to Spanish heritage language education, the increased digitization of communication during the Covid-19 pandemic has afforded new digital educational opportunities (Guillén, Sawin, & Avineri, 2020). In Fall 2020, in lieu of a service-learning assignment in which students had to be physically present in a...
Article
This study investigated classroom interaction through the framework of stancetaking (Du Bois, 2007) to understand how Spanish second language (L2) learners positioned themselves when participating in communicative language learning activities. Data came from transcribed audio and video recordings of three 90-minute lessons in one intermediate-level...
Chapter
Full-text available
Sociolinguistic concerns are of paramount importance in heritage language (HL) education because the macro-sociolinguistic context shapes HL speakers’ language experiences, knowledge, and use, as well as their socioaffective relationship to the language. This chapter offers a historical overview of sociolinguistic research related to HL speakers, a...
Article
Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR), rooted in the more established tradition of Community-Based Participatory Research (Deeb-Sossa 2019), seeks to empower patients in determining the most appropriate healthcare options by including and amplifying their voices in every aspect of the research process. In this article, we report on the outcomes...
Article
An important component of social justice research is centering the voices of those individuals whose lives the research is intended to improve, not as subjects from whom researchers collect data but as active participants in a process of understanding and addressing issues of concern to the community. This ideal of community engagement slows the pa...
Article
In response to the rising need for Spanish-English interpreters in the United States, there has been an increase in translation and interpreting and Spanish for the health professions courses in Spanish language programs (Martínez 2015). However, before Spanish students are exposed to a clinic or hospital context, they may have limited experience i...
Chapter
Despite the commitment of applied linguistics research to investigate language use in real-world contexts, applied linguists have struggled to make their work accessible and relevant outside academia. Acknowledging that the field has not yet reached its full potential, this book demonstrates how applied linguists can utilize their knowledge and met...
Preprint
Full-text available
The present study aims to better understand the maintenance of the Spanish language among Spanish speakers of Mexican family origin in Kansas. The study (a) examines the ways in which local language policy in Kansas can influence young bilinguals' experiences with language, and (b) considers the relationship between these experiences, the linguisti...
Article
This study examines the interpreter role among students who serve as interpreters in a community health clinic system in the Midwestern USA as part of a community health-themed service-learning course for advanced Spanish students. Drawing on Positioning Theory (Davies and Harré 1990), I consider the ways in which three second language learners and...
Preprint
Full-text available
This chapter reviews existing studies on pragmatics and Spanish heritage speakers (HS) and proposes new avenues for research in this area. First, we examine studies that have considered heritage speakers’ realization of speech acts, use of bilingual discourse markers and other elements of their pragmatic repertoire and practices. We then examine th...
Article
This paper examines the language ideologies among parents of Mexican family origin from Garden City, Kansas, and considers the ways in which Latinxs from different sociolinguistic generations have responded to an evolving societal context when making decisions about language use within the family. The analysis is based on 24 video-recorded intervie...
Preprint
This is a commentary on a forthcoming article in the Emergency Medicine Journal. It can be found at: https://emj.bmj.com/content/early/2019/08/11/emermed-2019-208929
Preprint
This study examines the interpreter role among students who serve as interpreters in a community health clinic system in the Midwestern United States as part of a community health themed service-learning course for advanced Spanish students. Drawing on Positioning Theory (Davies and Harré 1990), I consider the ways in which three second language le...
Article
Introduction:: Federal law requires any agency receiving federal aid to take "reasonable steps" to provide meaningful access to qualified limited English proficient (LEP) individuals. However, policies for the provision of language access services, including medical interpretation, vary substantially by state. The Latino population and the number...
Conference Paper
This study examines the experiences of three Spanish HS who served as interpreters in health clinics in the Midwestern U.S. as part of a healthcare service-learning program. Drawing on Holland and Lave’s (2001) ‘history-in-person’ and Practice Theory in applied linguistics (Young & Astarita, 2013), I consider students’ individual histories and thei...
Poster
Full-text available
This case study addresses the experiences of students participating in a medical Spanish service learning program in a network of non-profit healthcare clinics.
Conference Paper
Kansas: La frontera más oriental del oeste hispanohablante Ponencia presentada en el 26º congreso sobre el español en Estados Unidos/11º congreso sobre el español en contacto con otras lenguas, 6-8 abril 2017 Este estudio forma parte de una investigación más amplia sobre el español y los hispanohablantes en el estado de Kansas. El estudio está en u...
Article
La investigación sobre la pragmática de los hablantes de herencia (HH) de español sugiere que ellos comparten algunas características con los aprendices de español de segunda lengua en su producción de los actos de habla (Pinto y Raschio 2007); sin embargo, hace falta desarrollar una aproximación teórica para el análisis de estas similitudes. Basán...
Article
Drawing on linguistic anthropological notions of language ideologies (Kroskrity, 2004) and sociolinguistic approaches to stance (Jaffe, 2009a), this study examines the meaning-making resources through which Spanish heritage language (HL) learners orient toward ideological perspectives on language value and linguistic expertise in classroom interact...
Article
Full-text available
This case study examined how one instructor navigated between two competing discourses in an intermediate Spanish heritage language (HL) classroom: on the one hand, teaching ‘Standard Spanish’ to help students achieve professional success, and legitimizing home linguistic practices on the other. In addition to expressing both perspectives directly...
Article
Full-text available
This study examined classroom discourse in two Spanish language courses for Spanish-English bilingual students at a large university in central Texas, in order to investigate the ways that participants used language to construct their linguistic and cultural identities. The study found that students’ identities as bilinguals are linked to socially...
Chapter
Spaces of Polyphony covers a lot of ground. It echoes the voices of researchers and their informants from many different places and backgrounds. Among the variety of languages under study and methodological approaches there is also a common ground and narrative thread underpinning the polyphonic chorus of the contributors. From a shared starting po...
Article
Full-text available
People who grow up speaking Spanish in Texas often learn a colloquial variety of Spanish at home or in their communities and have limited abilities to move between different registers in different social contexts. As heritage language (HL) learners' understanding of the value of different language varieties plays an important role in the developmen...

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