2026 Hall of Fame Nominee
Franklin Pierce High School
Tacoma, WA
Language enables any individual to generate an astronomical number of expressions. By extension, language learning done right is about helping students to realize and activate within themselves their ability to fathom and swim in the immense sea of human possibility. What I mean by “done right” is that the language classroom needs to be a place where students regularly experience options and agency. We go beyond Googleable rote memorization, instead steadily introducing cultural stimuli with the aim of eliciting acts of communicative play, that is, language is the ultimate game through which players negotiate the meaning and value of existence.
I have seen time and again how students in my first-year Spanish immersion classes set aside their own inhibitions and doubts about the language, and, through a series of mutually constructed experiences, create a sort of microsociety. Students who have experienced schooling as oppressive and who have been labelled as problematic or carrying a deficit find themselves liberated in the right World Languages classroom, free to communicate and experience success anywhere on the spectrum of proficiency. As the educator, I persuade students to “play the game” of immersion in L2 and get to witness remarkable growth as they learn what works and what isn’t helpful and gradually construct a repertoire of strategies and tools tied to success.
Language learning done right nurtures and reinforces the practice of democracy. We learn together the arbitrary nature of language, how words can shift in form and meaning depending on the context, how there can be multiple approaches to expressing ideas or persuading audiences, how meaning is constructed and negotiated through simple participation. All this experience is transferable to civic participation. As our world continually trends towards globalism and transnationalism, we need more dialogue across a wider spectrum of topics than ever before. World Language instruction must position itself at the vanguard of this development.
Heritage language learning occupies a special place in this conversation, too. As a heritage Spanish speaker, I can’t overstate how empowering language study has been to my lifelong identity formation. In language study, we heritage learners find a lens for understanding our past and present, propelling us to reflect on our life and see it with new eyes. We strengthen familial ties and forge transnational identities through our academics. In a society which lures the children of immigrants with its assimilationist siren song, heritage language study is a wake-up reminder that our roots must be part of the future.
Most joyously, by proudly claiming our third space between ancestral tongues and English, we heritage learners gain agency within our culture, coming to see that rather than leaving it static it is ours to revitalize and redefine.