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Border talk: narratives of Spanish language encounters in the United States

Abstract US foreign language education is often presented as an opportunity to foster intercultural communication; yet, curricula frequently build borders between an English-speaking ‘we’ and a non-English-speaking ‘they’. Little is known, however, about how language students make sense of their changing linguistic identities as they encounter users of the language of instruction outside the classroom. This paper examines the stories those enrolled in university-level Spanish courses tell about their language learning histories and experiences. It considers how these stories construct particular, and frequently asymmetrical, social and linguistic borders.