Teaching Heritage Languages:

1. Teaching Heritage Languages: New Challenges and New Directions Guadalupe Valdes Stanford University

2. Focus of presentation • To provide a brief overview of the teaching of heritage languages • To talk about existing challenges and new directions

3. Definitions • Heritage languages • Heritage student

4. Heritage languages • Languages other than English ( LOTES) • Indigenous languages • Immigrant languages • Early colonial languages (e.g., Spanish in the Southwest)

5. Heritage student: two definitions • Personal interest definition • A heritage student is an individual who has a personal interest or involvement in an ancestral language. • Proficiency definition • A heritage students is a student who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language.

6. The teaching of languages other than English in the U.S. • The foreign-language-teaching profession • Role • Program levels • Secondary level • Post -secondary level • Languages selected for study • Commonly taught languages • Uncommonly taught languages

7. The teaching of heritage languages • Initially not part of the foreign language-teaching profession • Primarily community-based • Involved responses to felt needs by members of particular communities • After school language programs • Saturday language schools • Institutional responses to felt needs • Mother tongue teaching in parochial schools in the early part of the century

8. The teaching of heritage students in foreign language departments

9. The first phase • Institutional responses to demographic changes and open admissions policies • Increasing enrollment of heritage students in regular foreign language programs • Departments of Spanish • Responses to changing enrollments • The teaching Spanish to the “Spanish-speaking”

10. Challenges to Spanish Departments • Scattered efforts around the country • Lack of materials • Confusion about the purpose of instruction • Confusion about students referred to variously as “Spanish-speaking,” “bilingual students,” “quasi bilingual” students • Concern about appropriate pedagogies

11. The 70’s • The challenge of getting attention • From the foreign language profession • From publishers

12. The 80’s and early 90’s • Growing number of programs in languages other than Spanish • Growing interest by the foreign language profession • Increased variety of materials available • Dissertations • Articles and collections of articles • Continuing debates • What to teach • How to teach

13. The second phase • The Foreign Language Standards Effort (1993-1996) • The K-12 Student Standards Task Force included heritage student advocates. • Standards were written to address the needs of traditional foreign language students and heritage students. • The Standards’ five goals (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons, Communities) took into account both heritage speakers and traditional learners.

14. Today

15. Increased interest by many different groups • National Endowment for the Humanities • The Center for Applied Linguistics • National Foreign Language Center

16. Increased activities in many different languages • New online journal (Heritage Language Journal) • National conferences • Website (www.cal.org/heritage)

17. The New Language Teaching Profession The Foreign Language Teaching Profession The Heritage Language Teaching Profession The Foreign Language Teaching Profession To develop proficiencies in second languages To maintain and/or revive proficiencies in heritage languages

18. Languages after September 11 • The events of September 11th have made it clear that the very safety of Americans within their own homeland will depend on the availability of speakers of non-English languages who can support the efforts of the intelligence community at many levels. (Valdes, in press)

19. Voices in the conversation surrounding the teaching of heritage languages—after September 11 • As the Bahktin Circle demonstrated, the context for all discussions, including academic debates, encompasses the surrounding voices that help shape, reconfigure, and constantly change the multi-voiced utterances of the various speakers. (Valdes, in press)

20. Voices outside the profession National Defense Interests Community Interests English Only Global Business Interests Political Interests

21. Voices within the foreign language profession Applied linguists Literature specialists Theoretical linguists

22. The Challenges • Ideological challenges • Theoretical challenges • Pedagogical challenges

23. Ideological challenges

24. Defining ideology • The term evokes contradictory responses and has itself been ideologized (Geertz, 1973) • It is difficult to find neutral or non-evaluative definitions of the term.

25. Ideologies of language • representations, whether explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of language and human beings in a social world (Woolard,1998) • shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world (Rumsey,1990) • the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests(Irvine, 1989)

26. Ideologies of language directly affect: • What we expect from both heritage students and traditional foreign language students in our departments • What we focus on in our research • Decisions about who is qualified to teach

27. Ideologies of special concern • Ideologies about monolingualism and bilingualism • Ideologies of standardness, correctness, and linguistic purism

28. The monolingual perspective on “real” bilinguals • “True” or “real” bilinguals are the sum of two native-speaking monolinguals. According to this perspective, a true bilingual is expected to be two native speakers in one person.

29. Notions of the native speaker • Originally, native speakership was viewed as an uncontroversial privilege of birth. Those who were born into a language were considered its native speakers, with grammatical intuitions that nonnative speakers did not have.” The native speaker norm that has been recognized by foreign language departments in United States, for example, is, in fact, that of “ the middle-class, ethnically dominant male citizenry of nation-states.” (Kramsch, 1997:363).

30. Are heritage students “real” bilnguals or two native speakers in one?

31. To be natively competent in two languages would then mean to have had two childhoods, so that all the joys and frustrations of the fundamental period of life could penetrate one’s emotional response to the simple words of the language. It would mean to have acquired the skills of reading and writing that go with two separate educational systems such as all literate societies now impose on their adolescents, or the corresponding rigorous forms of initiation and skill development that formed part of all nonliterate societies. It would mean to have two different identities, one looking at the world from one point of view, the other from another; it would mean sharing in the social forms, prejudices, and insights of two cultures. In short it would mean being two entirely different speakers.(Haugen; 1981:54-55)

32. Ideologies of standardness, correctness, and linguistic purism

33. Purism is predicated on the following perceptions about a language • That it can be divided into acceptable and unacceptable elements • That these elements can be labelled “pure” or “impure” respectively • That a language chracterized as “pure” is one which is relative free of “impure” elements • That this concern about “purity” of a language can and indeed should be translated into some form of intervention which renders the language in question purer. (Thomas,1991:35)

34. All purism is a response either to some form of language contact or to variation within a language, or a combination of the two. It serves to sanction some linguistic features introduced by contact and variation and outlaw others…If xenophobic purism is the unmarked type of puristic orientation, then language contact of the bilingual type must be considered the archetypal situation in which it occurs. (Thomas, 1991:133)

35. In the case of heritage students it is important the we understand that: • Ideologies of bilingualism and monolingualism as well as ideologies of standardness, correctness and linguistic purism can lead to the creation of departmental climates where the existing proficiencies of heritage speakers are devalued, dismissed, or, even worse, held up to ridicule by non-native speakers.

36. Theoretical challenges

37. The need to push existing theories • Theories of L1 acquisition and development • Development of reading and writing abilities • Acquisition of academic registers • Acquisition of standard varieties • Theories of L2 acquisition and development • Acquisition of interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational communicative competencies • Acquisition of particular language features/elements • Linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic theories of bilingualism • Expansion of bilingual range • Transfer of literacy skills • Individual language maintenance

38. Pedagogical challenges • Who should teach? • Faculty • Lecturers • Graduate teaching assistants

39. The SHBS Program at Stanford • Classes for undergraduate heritage speakers • Taught by doctoral students who are specializing in Spanish literature • Second area of concentration: applied linguistics/sociolinguistics • Courses on bilingualism, Spanish dialectology, methods of teaching heritage languages, second dialect and second language acquisition

40. System in place • TA scheduled to teach is mentored by TA who taught in previous year • Team develops placement examination • Team works out publicity for entering students • Handbook for all department TA’s and lecturers

41. An effort is made to select both US Latinos, students from Latin America and Spain, and non-native students to teach in the sequence

42. Implementing such a program involves: • Commitment and interest by at least one faculty member • Support of department in general • Recruitment of entering doctoral students • Involvement of doctoral students in publication and research

43. The work ahead for the University of California • Several campuses already have well-developed programs in a number of languages • Existing expertise can be shared

44. The development of UC Guidelines isa major turning point in the teaching of heritage languages • It will bring concentrated attention by some of the best minds in the country to existing ideological, theoretical and pedagogical challenges.