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Contentid19659
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TitleWhat Language Classes Can Do for Heritage Learners’ Oral (and written) Skills
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Dr Anna Mikhaylova is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at University of Oregon, specializing in Second and Heritage Language Acquisition and Bilingualism. She also serves as Associate Editor of Heritage Language Journal (http://www.heritagelanguages.org), an online peer-refereed publication devoted to the teaching and learning of heritage languages.

Both anecdotal accounts of teachers and parents and some research studies point to an asymmetry in heritage and foreign language learners’ language experience that translates to asymmetries in their strengths and weaknesses. This is non-surprising because Grosjean’s (2008) Complementarity Principle applies to both types of bilinguals: they use the target language for different purposes with different people and in different domains. That is, heritage speakers, who acquire the language from birth in the home environment and often gaining literacy later than age-matched monolingual speakers of the language, are often found to be better at speaking and listening than at reading and writing. In contrast, foreign language speakers are known to be less fluent in oral skills and stronger in the literacy-based skills precisely because their main exposure to the language is in an academic context.

With that asymmetry in mind, recent scholarship has been pointing to the inadequacy of some of the teaching and assessment approaches that have been designed and found effective for foreign language learners when applied to the heritage language learner. For example, Kagan and Friedman (2003) suggest that OPI is a more valid measure of oral proficiency if ACTFL guidelines are supplemented with knowledge of features of heritage languages, such as limited registers, code-switching and asymmetry between oral proficiency and literacy levels. Along those lines Montrul and colleagues (2008) show that tasks that require more explicit knowledge are less familiar and this more difficult for heritage speakers than oral tasks relying on implicit knowledge of the language (while the picture is reversed for foreign language learners).

At the same time the oral and overall proficiency of heritage speakers should not be overestimated. It is often assumed that heritage language learners are capable of accomplishing a full range of speaking tasks of different levels of difficulty. However, Kagan and Dillon (2008), Dubinina (2012) and  Swender and colleagues (2014) show that while Russian heritage speakers control some registers, their discourse competence is limited by the range of social interactions in the family domain and they make a range of discourse errors, especially in more formal registers. Importantly, Kagan and Dillon (2008) suggest that even though the literacy skills of heritage learners when they enter language classes often are not developed beyond elementary levels, they are fast learners and can develop such skills fairly quickly. Also, research overviewed by Montrul (2012) shows that both heritage and foreign language learners benefit from instruction. All of this seems to point to the need to supply heritage language learners with the experience they are lacking, i.e. discourse competence that involves high-level skills in formal and academic registers. Importantly, it is crucial to provide them with experience and means of connecting what they are good at (listening and speaking) to the literacy-based skills.

The Activity of the Week by Marina Tsylina offers one such attempt, which proved successful in a Russian heritage language learner classroom.

References:

Dubinina, I. Y. (2012). How to Ask for a Favor: An Exploration of Speech Act Pragmatics in Heritage Russian (Doctoral dissertation, BRYN MAWR COLLEGE).

Grosjean, F. 2008. Studying Bilinguals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Kagan, O., & Friedman, D. (2003). Using the OPI to place heritage speakers of Russian. Foreign Language Annals, 36(4), 536-545.)

Kagan, O., & Dillon, K. (2008) Issues in Heritage Language Learning in the United States. In N. Van Deusen-Scholl & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2nd ed., Vol 4, pp. 143-156). New York: Springer Science+Business Media.

Montrul, S. (2012). Is the heritage language like a second language? EUROSLA Yearbook,12, 1-29.

Swender, E., Martin, C. L., Rivera‐Martinez, M., & Kagan, O. E. (2014). Exploring oral proficiency profiles of heritage speakers of Russian and Spanish. Foreign Language Annals, 47(3), 423-446.)

SourceCASLS Topic of the Week
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