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Melissa A. Bowles is an Associate Professor of Spanish, Linguistics, Educational Psychology and Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education and Director of the Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) PhD Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include classroom second language acquisition, heritage language acquisition, and language testing and assessment.

Increasingly, language teachers have not just second language (L2) learners in their classrooms, but another type of learner as well. This second kind of learner, called a heritage learner (HL), comes to the classroom with some proficiency in the language from family and/or community exposure.

The research on accuracy with adult L2 learners is clear; even with years of intensive contact with the L2 and large amounts of input, even in immersion settings, L2 learners have difficulty acquiring certain contrasts between their first language and their second language.  For such contrasts, L2 learners need information about what is not possible in the L2. This information can come in a variety of forms, but is probably most commonly seen in the form of explicit grammar rules or oral or written feedback/correction of errors.

But what about heritage learners? Not as large a base of research has been conducted on the efficacy of pedagogical interventions for HL learners, but several recent studies have shown that HL learners seem to benefit less from systematic grammar explanations than their L2 counterparts. HL learners have also been shown to be more accurate on tests that involve speaking and listening than L2 learners, whereas L2 learners have been shown to be more accurate on tests that involve reading or writing. This probably has to do with the fact that L2 learners tend to receive a lot of written input in the L2 classroom whereas HL learners have received most of their input in their heritage language in a naturalistic setting, through speaking and listening.

What does this all mean for language teachers? To complicate matters, many times both L2 and HL learners are enrolled together in the same classes. In cases like these, the best advice to maximize the learning outcomes for both groups of learners is

• To provide a mix of both oral and written input in the classroom.
• To give students a variety of tasks that focus on all four skills.  
• To create assessments that also reflect the four skills.
• When students work in small groups or pairs, mix them up so that they work with different classmates.
• If you sometimes have pairs made up of one L2 learner and one HL learner, research suggests that their strengths and weaknesses can complement each other so that both benefit! Just make sure to give them both oral and written tasks. L2 learners can share their knowledge with HL learners on written tasks and HL learners can provide assistance to L2 learners on oral tasks.

For more information, resources, and free online workshops on heritage language teaching, please visit UCLA's National Heritage Language Resource Center (http://startalk.nhlrc.ucla.edu/default_startalk.aspx).