Quechua Language Instruction and Assessment Across the Americas: Challenges and Solutions

Quechua, with nearly ten million speakers living primarily across the Andes, stands as the most widely spoken Indigenous language of the Americas today. Yet, this less commonly taught language (LCTL) continues to face significant challenges. This work illuminates and interrogates current barriers to Quechua language instruction and assessment within the United States, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. Collectively, the contributions to this volume offer a way forward with suggestions and solutions aimed at building the capacity of Quechua language stakeholders.

The volume describes barriers to effective Quechua language instruction and assessment, such as the problematic implementation of Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) in Peru and Ecuador, ineffective Quechua language learning materials, and inadequate Quechua language assessment instruments. To address these challenges, this work offers three primary solutions: expanding the target audience for Quechua language instruction and language learning materials, creating communicative language learning materials that reflect culturally appropriate, real-life situations and include nativized grammatical descriptions, and making necessary modifications to language proficiency assessment instruments. As such, it provides a blueprint for pushing Quechua language instruction and assessment beyond its current status and into a future in which instructors and students are offered high-quality, culturally grounded classroom experiences. These solutions may also apply to other LCTLs and, in particular, to other Indigenous languages of the Americas and beyond.

This timely volume, which responds to UNESCO's Global Call for Action in declaring 2022-2032 as the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, is essential reading for scholars, faculty, and students with interests in Indigenous languages, language acquisition (L1/L2), language pedagogy, language policy, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and decolonizing approaches to education.

Marilyn S. Manley is Professor of Spanish and Chairperson of the Department of World Languages at Rowan University, where she teaches Quechua. She is the co-editor of Quechua expressions of stance and deixis, in Brill’s Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas book series, 11, Leiden: Brill (2015).

Chad Howe is Professor of Spanish and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Spanish Perfects (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Lingüística de Corpus / The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Corpus Linguistics (2022, Routledge).