Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
INTRODUCTION
An increasing trend in many postsecondary foreign language classes in North America is the presence of heritage language learners. In its broadest sense, heritage language learners are the children of families who speak an ethnolinguistically minority language, but in this article I only discuss the case of immigrants. As adults, these children of immigrant families wish to learn, relearn, or improve their current level of linguistic proficiency in their family language. In language programs such as Spanish, Russian, East Asian languages, Hindi-Urdu, Turkish, Arabic, and others, heritage language learners attend classes initially geared to second language (L2) learners with no previous knowledge of the language. Alternatively, and depending on the institution, heritage speakers can also enroll in classes specifically designed for students with cultural and linguistic ties to the language. Although the presence of heritage speakers in language classes is not new,1 what is new is the recognition that heritage language learners are a different breed of language learners whose partial knowledge of the language presents a unique set of challenges to language practitioners. What is also new is the growing sense that minority languages are worth preserving and maintaining, rather than suppressing or ignoring.2 Indeed, among certain political circles, heritage language learners represent a unique and valuable national resource, as they can potentially fulfill the need for advanced and competent speakers of critical languages (Campbell & Rosenthal, 2000).
Today, the upcoming field of heritage language education has found a place and a voice of its own within applied linguistics. As a field that emerged out of necessity, driven primarily by demographic changes, heritage language education has been strongly concerned with issues of cultural identity (i.e., who exactly are heritage speakers?) as well as pedagogical and practical questions, including what to teach and how to best instruct heritage language learners so that their personal, cultural, and linguistic needs can be properly met (Brinton, Kagan, & Bauckus, 2008). Nonetheless, Valdés (1997, 2005) and Lynch (2003) have raised concerns about the atheoretical character of the field and its blind appropriation and adaptation of foreign language methods (Valdés, Fishman, Chávez, & Pérez, 2006). The implication of claims such as these seems to be that if heritage language education wants...