This study contributes to what is known about the nature of unbalanced bilingualism that emerges in language contact situations by examining the morphological knowledge of Spanish receptive heritage bilinguals (RHBs). RHBs were exposed to Spanish in their homes and communities but received formal schooling in English. These bilinguals have been described as being "on the verge of culminating the language shift towards English monolingualism" (Beaudrie, 2009a, p. 86), although despite this they report the ability to understand but not speak their heritage language. While the interpretation and production of inflectional morphology are difficult for more proficient heritage bilinguals (Montrul, 2008, 2009), little is known about the extent to which knowledge of morphology is measurable in HRBs or how it contributes to their ability to comprehend spoken Spanish. To answer these questions, 33 adult Spanish RHBs completed four, aurally-presented on- and off-line experimental tasks designed to assess their underlying grammatical competence, their receptive comprehension skills, and their proficiency without requiring that participants speak, read or write in Spanish. These tasks and the skills they assessed are listed below. 1) A self-paced, aural grammaticality judgment task examined whether RHBs have access to the rules that govern the well-formedness of specific inflectional morphemes, including gender and subject/verb agreement, as well as tense, aspect, and mood morphemes. 2) A morpheme interpretation task assessed whether RHBs interpret the meaning supplied by bound morphemes and distinguish between semantic contrasts. 3) A contextualized listening comprehension task measured the listening comprehension abilities of RHBs. 4) An elicited imitation task measured the proficiency of RHBs. The results of this study show that RHBs do have underlying morphological competence and are able to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical morphemes despite their limited language skills in other domains. Additionally, these bilinguals interpret the meaning supplied by bound morphemes, although access to the rules governing both the structure and the semantics of these morphemes decreases in accordance with the order in which they were acquired in childhood. RHBs understand the majority of what they hear when listening to spoken Spanish, and on average their proficiency ranges from low to intermediate levels. An analysis of the linear relationship between the results of the four experimental tasks revealed that the extent to which listening comprehension abilities and proficiency correspond to morphological knowledge in Spanish RHBs is dependent on the degree of access that these bilinguals have to the semantic information provided by functional morphemes. The results of this study show that while the core syntax of Spanish RHBs is intact, semantic knowledge may not have been mapped to certain morphemes during the acquisition process. These results are analyzed in tandem with various hypotheses that have been recently put forth to account for the linguistic outcomes of contact bilingualism, and an argument is made for considering heritage grammars as completely acquired but distinct language varieties.

Receptive bilinguals have been in a dilemma of knowing just enough Spanish to write and aurally comprehend the curriculum at the beginning-intermediate levels of a Spanish language course. This dichotomy in classrooms with mixed-ability learners has created a need to reconsider placement and pedagogical structures tailored for these students in foreign language courses. Thus, this descriptive study examined the perceptions of receptive bilinguals, drawn from two secondary Spanish courses regarding receptive bilinguals’ language use, personal Spanish language abilities and confidence, personal beliefs about the language, and contentment with the course. For this study, 31 participants were selected from two public high schools in a suburb of a large metropolitan area in north Texas. Two surveys, a listening assessment and an online questionnaire, were administered at the end of the academic year. The Likert questionnaire items were analyzed using SPSS software, while open-ended questions were coded for recurrent themes. Analyses revealed four major findings. First, with regard to influence on language use, participants’ grandparents created the most interaction with the Spanish language when compared with the other family groups. In addition, Spanish influence through television, literature, radio, and music contributed to students’ early childhood Spanish learning. Second, as to language preference, although participants perceived English to be the language with which they were most at ease, they were also confident in their Spanish conversational abilities. Third, with respect to perceptions of language abilities, Spanish 2Pre-AP students noticed an increased ability in listening, speaking, and writing the language. In both courses, students’ receptive ability was one of the highest abilities. Receptive bilinguals reflected a sense of pride and passion for the language. They desired to improve their language through their own self-motivation as a way to connect with family. Fourth, and finally, in reporting on course contentment, participants expressed overall contentment with the course, irrespective of the particular course in which they were enrolled; however, some did not agree that all curricular structures were to their benefit. Results indicate a need to place students with receptive bilingual skills in courses designed to meet their specific linguistic characteristics.