Factors predicting secondary school language course enrollment and performance among U.S. heritage speakers of Spanish.

Introduction: While a growing body of research indicates that Spanish language courses can promote Spanish maintenance and lead to overall improved educational outcomes among heritage speakers, there is little empirical or longitudinal evidence of factors that shape their enrollment in Spanish language courses at the secondary level. To address this issue, the current study takes a large-scale, longitudinal approach to investigate rates of enrollment in secondary school (6th-12th grade) Spanish and other non-English language courses, as well as factors that predict heritage speakers' enrollment and performance in non-English language courses.

Method: We analyzed subsample data from the Miami School Readiness Project (MSRP), a large-scale, longitudinal study consisting of 17,341 heritage speakers of Spanish (47% female, 95.