View Content #19558

Kathryn Paul is the Executive Director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC), founded in 2006, is a project of the UCLA Center for World Languages and funded by Title VI of the Department of Education. NHLRC’s mission is to contribute to and disseminate knowledge on effective language education for heritage speakers.

Heritage speakers have been exposed to a language other than the one spoken dominantly in a society (English in the U.S.) at home but they are educated primarily in English. Their skills in their heritage language are unevenly developed; for example, they may hold conversations and understand movies and broadcasts but at the same time be illiterate and unable to speak about academic topics.

While it is unknown how many U.S. residents are heritage speakers, they are a subset of the 20% of the U.S. population that speaks a language other than English at home. This percentage varies by location, and in some urban areas it far exceeds 50%.

Heritage speakers have the potential to become highly proficient bilinguals but teachers have been trained, and textbooks written, to teach foreign languages, and these approaches and materials are not appropriate.

The right pedagogy and materials help heritage speakers to develop intellectually and personally, strengthen family ties, and contribute to the country’s language capital. However, many heritage speakers who seek out instruction in their home languages have no courses or programs that address their needs, resulting in diminished motivation and squandered potential.

NHLRC seeks to develop and institutionalize the field of heritage language education in the following areas:

Research: with an annual research institute, where participants present and discuss research findings, the Heritage Language Journal, which publishes research papers informing heritage language education, and an international conference every four years. Our website offers research papers, assessment tools, and other materials for instructors and researchers.

Teacher education: with yearly workshops for K-16 heritage language instructors, a free online workshop, and work with several local school and systems to offer teacher education across languages. We also have created a website for community school educators to share ideas and resources.

Program design and teaching materials: with a high school heritage language program for local high school students, an especially underserved population, in languages that widely spoken but rarely taught. In summer 2015 we will offer Armenian, Korean, Persian, and Russian. Teaching materials, guidelines, and more related to heritage language programs are freely available on our website.

This week's Activity of the Week features an annotated list of resources available from the NHLRC.