To see past articles in this column go to Diverse Learners section.
See more on Heritage Learners on the CAL site and answer an ongoing survey here.
Belinda A. Sauret is the Editor of this column, see picture on the right.

June/July 2010

Un petit Tour du Recherche - From why to how and back
by Belinda A. Sauret

A kind-hearted teacher who taught Algebra in the room across the hall from mine mused aloud while we stood watching the copier churn that if he were to move to another country he would make sure that his children spoke only the language of the new home country.

“Really,” I asked, making my eyes as round in astonishment as I could. “So, you wouldn’t let them talk to their grandparents? You wouldn’t let them talk to you?”
I told him about my own grandmother’s fears that, while her daughter’s children were growing up in Argentina, they would lose the ability to understand the stories that grandma told. Of course, his observation wasn’t really about my childhood; it was about our present: he was uncomfortable having so many students speaking other languages in our school and was trying to grapple with what the new reality meant.

I suspect that I’m not the only teacher who’s ever had to quietly defend what I do in teaching Spanish for Native Speakers or Spanish for Heritage Learners. His cocked eyebrow and measured, “Shouldn’t they be learning English instead?” hinted at so much misinformation about the nature of language learning and bilingualism. In this case, as in others like it, I just responded with, “English speakers take English classes and Spanish speakers take Spanish classes,” while I make a mental note that I will wait for a better occasion to show my friend the research about the value of bilingualism cited on the ACTFL website. http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4524

The lack of knowledge is just surprising to me, but for some of my students such ignorance, especially when it comes out of the mouth of someone in authority, can be destructive. A student of mine can’t speak to his parents because, in an effort to assure for their son all the promises of liberty in their new land, they stopped speaking to him in their native tongue. Now he can’t really speak to them nor they to him. On the upside, he’s been studying his parents’ language and once in a while will ask me for clarification about a linguistic or grammatical term. In some of those exchanges, he’ll echo doubts he’s heard from others with an anxiety-revealing “I read somewhere...” construction. “I read somewhere that some writers have really rich vocabularies because they only focussed on one language,” or “I read somewhere that knowing two languages makes little kids not be able to pronounce either one right.” It’s my hope that next summer’s trip to Asia will assure him that there are only advantages in communicating to more people in more languages. Other students I know share community languages with their families-Vietnamese, Laotian, or Amharic-but they’ve never had the chance to learn history and culture through a study of that literature.

So, on behalf of our would-be, could-be, emergent bilingual students, I invite you to review just three journal articles about why teaching Heritage Language Learners is important and how we can make our efforts more effective:

Lee, Jin Sook and Eva Oxelson, “”It’s Not My Job’: K-12 Teacher Attitudes Toward Students’ Heritage Language Maintenance”, Bilingual Research Journal, Volume 30: 2 Summer 2006, 453-477.

Even if you haven’t had experiences similar to mine, I would bet that students in your Heritage Language classes could tell stories about the disdain or outright disapproval of their languages that they’ve faced from teachers or other significant authority figures. The Lee and Oxelson article traces the process and the findings of a survey of teachers. The authors set out to see the depth of knowledge and the nature of attitudes among faculty members with regards to questions of language and culture. The findings lead logically to actionable recommendations, but the introduction offers a whole host of reminders (with all the appropriate research citations) of why we teach Heritage Languages:

Proficiency in the heritage language not only facilitates English acquisition...and leads to higher academic achievement...but also results in greater cognitive flexibility including an enhanced ability to deal with abstract concepts...students who do not have the opportunity to fully develop in both languages are significantly more likely to drop out of schools than those fluent in both languages.(p. 455)

Further, the authors point to research that indicates “that when teachers communicate that only English is appropriate for school. Students infer that their home language and culture are less important.” But all is not lost, since even in cases where the subject is not the heritage language and the teacher is not a speaker of that language, “positive effects are also found when teachers express interest in the heritage language and treat it as a resource”(p. 456). The authors cite a teacher comment to point out that this support of a Heritage Language doesn’t have to be elaborate, “Just asking them to share some things in their language, letting them use it. Then they don’t have to hide that part of themselves. It’s part of who they are. They can be proud” (p. 468).

Tse, Lucy. “Resisting and Reversing Language Shift: Heritage-Language Resilience among U.S. Native Biliterates.” Harvard Educational Review, Volume 71, Number 4, Winter, 2001.

While we may rightfully lament the typical loss of heritage language literacy, Lucy Tse looked at a small group of not-so-typical heritage language speakers, those who bucked this trend, who maintained or improved literacy in their ancestral language. She delineates two common factors in the ten bilingual/biliterate college and university students she interviewed: first, what she calls “language vitality,” a factor that includes the status and prestige of the language, peers and parents who speak the language and “contact with institutions that valued the language” and second, language environment and literacy. The students in the study spoke Cantonese, Japanese and Spanish. Tse’s findings include some revealing remarks by the students themselves: Julie, for example, became interested in teen culture in Japan, and that interest served to motivate her reading. Tse also addresses how questions of identity helped to make the heritage language an entrée into a privileged group rather than a marker that identified the speaker as part of a stigmatized minority. The interviews and personal experiences of the students help make this study very readable. Tse doesn’t claim that the conditions are entirely within the purview of schools or individual teachers, but she does offer support for making schools and individual classrooms rich in varied texts from the target language.

Ducar, Cynthia M. “Student Voices: The Missing Link in the Spanish Heritage Language Debate,” Foreign Language Annals, Volume 41, No. 3, Fall 2008. 415-433.

Ducar includes the questionnaire that she used with the 152 heritage language students whose opinions she sought. In addition to some surprising findings (“91% of those surveyed want their Spanish to be corrected”) she also offers some practical and realistic suggestions for course activities that address students’ perceptions of what they need to learn in Spanish. These projects include students’ producing “linguistic autobiographies” or surveys and analyses of different terms in Spanish. Some of these respond to the fact that students in her survey indicated that they were looking to broaden their competency in a “personally relevant” variety of Spanish; for these University of Arizona students that meant that “a Mexican or Mexican-American variety of Spanish would be the students’ first choice in the classroom.” Based on Ducar’s results and suggestions, I believe I will have my students put together a sort of linguistic map of expressions they typically use like naiden or muncho. (Naiden is used instead of "nadie" the more widespread word to express "nobody” or “no one.”  Muncho is used instead of "mucho," in Spanish to say "a lot" or "much.")

I hope that summer will allow you at least a little time to reconsider why we teach Heritage Languages and that reading these articles (ask your public library to use Interlibrary Loan to get them for you) will afford you new ideas to make the class ever more relevant for our students. I, for one, will mull over these words:

Knowing two languages is much more than simply knowing two ways of speaking. Some of what is learned about the second language appears to be attached directly to the first language, while other aspects create new ways of thinking and new mental organizations. The result of this is that the mind of a bilingual speaker has a different structure than the mind of a monolingual. While it may involve a value judgment to describe it as richer, or more complex, it seems evident that the mind of a speaker who has in some way attached two sets of linguistic details to a conceptual representation ... has entertained possibilities and alternatives that the monolingual speaker has had no need to entertain. (Bialystock and Hakuta cited in Cooper, et al. “Foreign Language Learning and SAT Verbal Scores Revisited” Foreign Language Annals 41, 2, Summer 2008.)

For information about ACTFL’s position on Heritage Language Learning, please go to:
http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=5152.

Use the comment box below, or send your message directly to me: rootwords@nclrc.org

Challenges & Strides in Heritage Language Education
by Victoria Hasko, Ph.D. University of Georgia

On the pages of the NCLRC Newsletter and beyond, language educators and scholars have been pondering over the question of how the U.S. language education system can be improved to ensure maintenance and development of heritage languages. The question does not have easy answers, as we are only beginning to understand the nature of heritage language acquisition and to envision solutions for developing an effective and responsible heritage language education policy. Here, I will provide an overview of some of the critical issues that the field of heritage language education is facing today and will share some innovative educational initiatives that heritage language educators have been recently experimenting with in the state of Georgia, a state with a rapidly growing immigrant population.

Challenges we are facing
The first critical step on the path to serving the needs of heritage language learners involves identifying their educational needs, which presents a formidable challenge. Heritage language learners are not a monolithic group: the circumstances of their upbringing are varied in sociocultural, educational, economic, dialectal, ancestral terms, etc. As a result, they come to school with a broad range of skills from purely receptive to fluent, depending on the amount, quality, and contexts of exposure to the heritage language. In spite of a growing body of studies, the topics of heritage language acquisition and pedagogy remain woefully under-researched with many questions pertaining to the dynamics and profile of heritage language acquisition still unanswered. Coherent pedagogical theories which would guide and inform research on heritage language learning and teaching are yet to be fully articulated (Valdés, 2001).

There is some consensus in the literature about the general strengths and weaknesses that apply to students whose parents speak the heritage language at home. Because they are typically exposed to their familial language from birth, these students come to school with significantly more developed speaking and listening comprehension skills than traditional foreign language students (Kondo-Brown, 2005; Valdés, 2005). However, their profile often does not fit upper-level academic courses. Although heritage language learners may be well-versed in everyday topics (e.g. house chores, prayers, play talk), their academic lexicon and knowledge of the formal register is limited, and oral speech might abound in colloquialisms, non-standard forms, and dialectal variations. What particularly sets heritage language learners apart from students who learned foreign languages in academic settings is that the former typically either completely lack literacy skills in the heritage language or lag behind the traditionally-educated students in reading and writing abilities (Friedman & Kagan, 2008; Valdés, 2005).

Heritage language education is currently realized through various models in elementary and secondary schools. Most heritage language students enroll in traditional foreign language courses, much to the dismay of foreign language teachers who have no training or prior knowledge of how heritage language and “true” foreign language acquisitional systems differ and how the academic needs of these two populations can be met (Schwartz, 2001; Valdés, 2005). Hybrid courses in which both heritage and non-heritage students are placed together may fall short in serving the needs of both learner groups (Sohn & Shin, 2007). As traditional students struggle with oral skills, they may feel threatened by the seeming fluency of heritage language students. At the same time, activities characteristic of initial foreign language instruction, such as listening to simplified dialogues, engaging in basic vocabulary drills, and producing scripted output exercises, do not contribute to the linguistic development of heritage language students and decrease their levels of motivation. Harklau (in press) conducted ethnographic case studies documenting experiences of several high school heritage language students placed in traditional Spanish classes. She found that while the students entered the classes with neutral or positive expectations, they left with antipathy, frustration, low course averages, and the perception that Spanish classes are boring (in fact, “the boringest”!). The students additionally felt disempowered and stigmatized by the teacher’s dismissal of the regional dialects they spoke.

Language courses or articulated tracks specifically designed for heritage language learners are still exceptions rather than a rule. The number of students enrolled in these courses varies from state-to-state and to depend on local variables, such as demographic situation, state and local policies, levels of support for minority language education, funding, etc. Valdés (2006) reports that 18% of U.S. universities and only 9% of secondary schools offer special courses for heritage speakers. Foreign language immersion programs and two-way or dual immersion programs present alternative pathways for heritage language education. The latest updates in the CAL’s online directory report that in 2006 there were 263 foreign language immersion programs in the U.S., and the number of two-way immersion programs reached 335 in 2007. Originally designed for and still largely serving monolingual English-speaking communities, immersion programs have been shown effective in helping heritage language students develop biliteracy and reach academic success (Christian, 2008; cf., Wang & Green 2001).

Offering more language courses designed specifically for heritage language students is constrained not only by such issues as funding, policy, or logistics, but also by a shortage of interested instructors. Teachers who take on the challenges of developing and offering heritage language courses are undoubtedly passionate and devoted educators, but they also require support and training in the topics of heritage language acquisition, pedagogy, bilingualism, sociolinguistics, and dialectology (cf. Schwartz, 2001). The demands of being a heritage language teacher are not trivial. Successful heritage language teaching demands that teachers significantly revise their pedagogical practices, create well-articulated course tracks and lesson plans, develop new materials, as well as identify appropriate assessment and placement tools.  Outside of the classroom, heritage language teachers often find themselves serving as surrogate counselors, administrators, and ESL teachers as they are asked to translate and interpret for their students and their families (Colomer & Harklau, forthcoming); such responsibilities do not only impose extra responsibilities but require special preparation and skills. Foreign language teacher education programs are responding to the new demands in the field very slowly: only a small number of universities offer courses and programs designed to prepare language educators to meet the needs of heritage language students. In the next section, I will describe several exciting initiatives that have been recently implemented by educators in Georgia to address the aforementioned challenges in the field of heritage language education and teacher preparation.

Strides in Georgia
As one of the fastest growing states in the country, Georgia has witnessed a significant influx of immigrants over the last decade and, consequently, remarkable changes in school demographics For example, Gwinnett County in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area, one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, saw a dramatic increase in the number of students with home languages other than English (LOTE) from 2002 to 2008; specifically, the numbers doubled from 28,454 to 56,791, with Spanish-speaking heritage students as the largest linguistic minority group (Jahner, 2009). As a result of proactive educational efforts in the county, the number of students enrolled in Spanish for Native Speakers courses increased tenfold over the last 6 years. Still, much work remains to be done, as even after these accommodations, the country could provide heritage language instruction to only about 2% of all LOTE students enrolled in the county’s public schools in 2007-2008 (ibid.).

Hispanics are one of the largest minority groups in Georgia. While it had not been considered a state with a high percentage of Hispanic population in the past, this has changed over the last decade. Today, Georgia is home to over 730,000 Hispanics, and its schools are implementing innovative and welcome initiatives to maintain and develop Spanish proficiency in heritage language students, 45% of whom are native-born (Pew Hispanic Center, 2007). Thus, in 2006 the first Georgia public dual language English-Spanish charter school Unidos opened its doors to level K-1 students in Clayton County. Today 312 students are enrolled in K-3 grades, 46% of whom are heritage speakers of Spanish, and the school is continuing to grow. In accordance with the dual language immersion model, English-speaking and Spanish-speaking children study together and receive content area and literacy instruction in both languages, following a “one language – one teacher” principle. Students in grades K-1 start out with 70% of instruction time in Spanish and 30% of instruction time in English before switching to a 50/50 model in levels 2-5. There are no language courses per se, as language instruction is grounded in content-based curriculum. For example, students learn science-related academic vocabulary in English and Spanish as they engage in meaningful contextualized reading, discussions, and writing activities in science classes in each of the two languages. Spanish Languages Arts and English Language Arts classes zoom in on literacy skills development. One of the school’s primary goals is for all of its students to reach bilingualism and biliteracy by the time they finish fifth grade. Unidos has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) each year since it opened in 2006 and in 2008 was awarded the Superintendent's Distinguished Achievement Award by the Georgia Department of Education for improvement in Grade One Reading on the CRCT.

In 2008, the World Language Academy followed suit by launching into the first year of the dual language immersion program at Hall County School System’s first charter school of choice. During the first academic year, the additive English-Spanish bilingual program was open to grades K-1, and as this cohort of students progresses through the grades, the dual-immersion format will follow them. Similarly to Unidos, about half of the students the school serves are heritage speakers of Spanish, i.e. the World Language Academy integrates native English speakers and heritage Spanish speakers in the same classroom and provides quality, standards-based content instruction in both languages.  Grades K and 1 are in a 70/30 model, which will shift to 60/40 in the next year reaching a 50/50 balance when this year’s first grade students progress to grades three through five. The World Language Academy is unique, as in addition to promoting bilingualism and biliteracy in English and Spanish, Mandarin Chinese is taught to all students in grades K-5. Both charter schools have generated much excitement in their respective counties and the state, with hopeful parents turning up in such high numbers, that the schools will hold a lottery to establish the order for the waiting list for the 2009-2010 academic year.

To encourage heritage language students to apply to and succeed in colleges, West Hall High School in Hall County articulated and developed a comprehensive curriculum for heritage speakers of Spanish leading to Advanced Placement (AP) Spanish Literature courses. The AP program turned out to be a great success resulting in the highest AP scores in the school (Sauret, 2008). In 2006, the school additionally established the first International Baccalaureate (IB) School for heritage speakers of Spanish (A1) in a U.S. public school. IB policy presupposes the right of heritage students to study their own language at the highest level, and, accordingly, West Hall offers its Hispanic students an opportunity to develop personal appreciation of the literature written in their heritage language, to gain literary criticism skills, as well as to strengthen written and oral skills in Spanish as part of the rigorous IB course of study (Sauret, 2009). Both educational initiatives at West Hall High School serve as a convincing demonstration that the study of heritage languages does not only lead to linguistic gains but also to students’ increased confidence in themselves and in their academic abilities.

At the University of Georgia, we have also taken steps to address the educational needs of in-service and pre-service teachers interested in offering heritage language courses. In Spring of 2009, a graduate-level seminar titled “Heritage Language Education in Georgia” was offered with the goal of exploring the issues related to providing high quality heritage language education, particularly as they apply to our local context. The seminar addressed such topics as the dynamics of heritage language acquisition, factors that promote or inhibit retention of heritage languages, methodological considerations, instructional needs of heritage language students and professional needs of teachers, state demographics, and types of programs serving heritage language communities in Georgia. In the spirit of serving local heritage language communities, the students in the course participated in a service learning project by running bilingual storytime sessions in Spanish and Korean at the local library during the course of the semester. In Spring 2010, the University of Georgia will be offering the course on a satellite campus in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area, so that more of the in-serving teachers typically commuting to Athens from Atlanta could have an opportunity to benefit from taking the course.

Much work remains to be done for the field of heritage language education, but exciting initiatives are springing up across the country (cf. Brinton et al., 2008; Kirklighter et al., 2007; Valdés et al., 2006) bringing education activism and attention to the heritage language communities which represent the most underserved, excluded, and marginalized student populations. More than ever, heritage language learners and teachers need attention, support, respect, and representation in the school system, government, universities, funding agencies, and heritage language communities. Therefore, I conclude with the call to action: “In a nation of diverse languages and cultures, we must do what we can to ensure that our linguistic wealth and cultural heritage are passed down to the next generation.” (Wang & Green, 2001, p.187).

References

Baker, C. (2006). Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Brecht, R., & Ingold, C. (2002). Tapping a national resource: Heritage languages in the United States. ERIC Digest EDO-FL-02-02. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics/ERIC.

Brinton, D., Kagan, O., & Bauckus, S. (2008). (Eds.). Heritage language education: A new field emerging. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Colomer, S., & Harklau, L. (forthcoming). Spanish teachers as impromptu translators and liaisons in new Latino communities. Foreign Language Annals.

Christian, D. (2008). School-based programs for heritage language learners: Two-way immersion. In Brinton, Kagan & Bauckus, 257-268.

Friedman, D., & Kagan, O. (2008). Academic writing proficiency of Russian heritage speakers: A comparative study. In Brinton, Kagan & Bauckus, 181-198.

Gunning, T. G. (2008). Creating literacy instruction for all students. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Harklau, L. (in press). High school Spanish in the new Latino diaspora. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies.

Hornberger, N. H., & Wang, S. C. (2008). Who are our heritage language learners?  Identity and biliteracy in heritage language education in the united states. In Brinton, Kagan & Bauckus, 3-35.

Jahner, D. (2009, February 10). Spanish for native speakers. Invited lecture, University of Georgia. Athens, GA.

Kondo-Brown, K. (2005). Differences in language skills: Heritage language learner subgroups and foreign language learners. The Modern Language Journal, 89(4), 563-581.

Kirklighter, C., Cardenas D., Wolff Murphy, S. (2007). Teaching writing with Latino/a students. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Peyton, J. K., Ranard, D. A., & McGinnis, S. (2001). Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource. Washington DC: CAL.

Pew Hispanic Center. A Pew Research Center Project. Accessed in October 2009, http://pewhispanic.org/.

Shannon, S. (1999). The debate on bilingual education in the U.S.: Language ideology as reflected in the practice of bilingual teachers. In J. Blommaert (Ed.) Language ideological debates (171-200). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Schwartz, A. M. (2001). Preparing teachers to work with heritage language learners. In Peyton, Ranard &McGinnis, 229-254.

Sohn, S. & Shin, S. (2007). True beginners, false beginners, and fake beginners: Placement strategies for Korean heritage speakers. Foreign Language Annals 40(3), 407-418.

Sauret, B.A. (2009). An innovative program for heritage learners of Spanish. Paper presented at the ACTFL Convention. Orlando, FL.

S auret, B.A. (2009). The International Baccalaureate approach to native language study. NCLRC Newsletter. Retrieved in October 2009, http://www.nclrc.org/about_teaching/topics/learner_diversity.html#bacca.

Valdés, G. (2001). Heritage language students: Profiles and possibilities. In Peyton, Ranard & McGinnis, 37-80.

Valdés, G. (2005). Bilingualism, heritage language learners, and SLA research: Opportunities lost or seized? The Modern Language Journal, 89(3), 410–426.

Valdés, G. (2006). Introduction: The development of non-English-language resources in the United States. In Valdés, Fishman, Chávez, and Pérez, xiii-xxi.

Valdés, G., Fishman J.A., Chavez, R.M, Perez, W. (2006).  Towards the Development of Minority Language Resources: Lessons from the Case of California.  Multilingual Matters: London.

Wang, S., & Green, N. (2001). Heritage language students in the K-12 education system. In Peyton, Ranard &McGinnis, 167-196.

Wright, S. C., & Bougie, E. (2007). Intergroup contact and minority-language education: Reducing language-based discrimination and its negative impact. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 26(2), 157-181.

October 2009

Can it be done?  Is it really possible for Heritage Language students to learn well in a class where the majority of students are second-language learners?

B. A. Sauret

Ms. R of Colorado, posed this question in an email that she sent to the NCLRC newsletter.

“Some Spanish teachers and some administrators consider [it] fine to have Heritage Spanish students mixed in a class with non-natives taking Spanish as a FL.” Ms. R went on to point out that research suggests that the needs of Heritage Spanish students are very different from those of second language learners. Her question was not just one of curiosity since at her school a plan is afoot “to have the same level for Spanish IV and Heritage Spanish Course level 2 (the school only has two levels for Heritage students). I think this is not a good route to take. They will be doing a disservice to the Heritage students whose needs fall in different range than those of Americans taking Spanish as a FL.” Further, she inquires about professional organizations that, she hopes, will help find ways of “giving Native Spanish students better opportunities to improve their literacy in Spanish, and to learn more of their own cultures.”

The question, or rather, all three questions (about mixed classes, the needs of Spanish for Native Speaker (SNS) students, and the role of professional organizations) seemed huge and current, and email seems a medium too little suited to nuance for this (or these) discussions. So, Ms. R agreed to a phone interview.

It turns out this is an issue faced by both Ms. R and her sister, both of them teaching in charter schools. While they’re glad that there are students who are Native or Heritage speakers of Spanish in both schools, they also find smaller schools like these (between 300-400 students) often have scheduling and staffing limitations. As a result of these limitations, at least for this year, they have mixed classes. Naturally, since they’re familiar with the work of Guadalupe Valdez and that of Ana Roca, they would prefer to be able to direct classwork toward the specific needs typical of SNS students: increasing reading skills and expanding vocabulary into academic content areas. And since these students have shown the gumption to apply to and attend a charter school, these young scholars’ skills should be nurtured.

Or to appropriate a phrase that Ms. C uses on occasion in her remarks on FLTEACH and on the AP Spanish listserve, “we should treasure these students.” Ms. C has taught for twenty-five years in a school of about 2200 students, located in a Texas suburb. Over those years she has watched the Hispanic portion of the institution grow to 42% of the total school population. But she didn’t just watch: she developed a Spanish for Native Speakers program that takes students through to Advanced Placement Spanish Language. In addition to a strong pass rate on the demanding AP test, Ms. C can also point to another sort of success: many students who complete the SNS sequence of classes take advantage of one of the many advantages of bilingualism, metalinguistic skills that make learning a third language easier. These students often take French, Japanese, Chinese, German or Latin classes.

While Ms. C does recommend separate classes for Heritage Spanish learners, the reality is that too often teachers have to juggle more than one class preparation within a single class period. For Ms. R and for others struggling to manage this pedagogical sleight-of-hand, Ms. C offers some ideas:

• For her native speaker students whose academic skills need improvement, Ms. C has a particularly useful and simple reading activity. With regards to developing reading skills in her charges, she makes mention of a conversation she had with a reading specialist. According to her source, two problems that many students have when it comes to taking reading tests is that they lack the stamina to read for more than about five minutes, coupled with the fact that they haven’t developed the habit of forming mental images of what they have just read. The answer that Ms. C used in her classes involves some independent group work, suitable for her group of 3 native speaker students. Ms. C gives her groups of three all the same reading. For a limited period of time, say 15 minutes, the students are asked to read together. They can read aloud, they can help each other with difficult words, but they must read steadily. They can’t lift their writing utensils though until all members of the group have returned the reading to the teacher. Then each student must make a drawing to represent the content of the reading. Variety and high interest are key here, so Ms. C picks things that she can get enthusiastic about and things that she can involve the students in. When test time comes along, Ms. C includes one of the previously read (and drawn) selections as part of the evaluation.
• Technology can play a part in giving SNS students useful activities that help correct errors they might have. Most faculty who have taught heritage language students are aware that certain structures that have no strong equivalent in English, will often start to disappear from the heritage language. For Spanish, subjunctive forms, especially the imperfect, will often be mysterious for students who have spent most of their school years in the United States. One of Ms. C’s favorite websites, conjuguemos.com, corrects students’ work. While Ms. C describes the website as basically a big online workbook, students may keep on working on the activities until they score a sufficiently high mark, and then move on to other activities.
• Another academic skill that can be practiced in the SNS classroom is note-taking. Here Ms. C offers for Ms. R’s and the reader’s use a series of Powerpoints that were put together on the topic of Human Rights. While she goes through the Powerpoint with the students she asks them to take notes of central ideas, not to copy the Powerpoints, but to digest them to the degree that their notes will serve as a recall for the thrust of the material. These remarkable high-interest materials are available at http://maestrastacy.wikispaces.com/

Finally, I would point out that our professional organizations do offer support. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) has a Special Interest Group (SIG) on the topic of Spanish for Native Speakers. This SIG even offers scholarships for teachers to attend the national conference in November.

The American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) has long offered the National Spanish Examination, and they even have a specific category of competition for bilingual students. Additionally, local chapters of the AATSP may offer competition in writing and in poster-making. These may also include native speaker or heritage language categories.

Many readers will have had Ms. R’s experience, trying to teach well to native speaker students, using a curriculum that did not originally have them in mind. If you would like to share how you’ve coped with this difficult situation, we would be pleased to pass along your ideas.

March 2009

Discourses in Dying Languages: My Story With Yiddish

On January 25, the National Museum of Language hosted University of Maryland Professor Miriam Isaacs. as part of the Marian M. Jenkins Memorial Speaker Series. A Visiting Assistant Professor of Yiddish in the Jewish Studies Program of the University's Meyerhoff Center for Jewish studies, Isaacs spoke about her family history and how she became interested in the Yiddish language. Born in a post-war refugee camp in Germany in 1946, Isaacs grew up in Montreal with parents who exclusively spoke Yiddish at home. Isaacs recounted a story of how one day, when she was 10, her father explained why it was important for her to know the language.

"He told me that that I was an intelligent girl and that I could learn English well anyhow," Isaacs said. "But if I didn’t speak Yiddish at home, I wouldn’t know where I came from."

Since that conversation, Isaacs said, she has had an interest in sustaining the Yiddish language and other fading languages of ethnic minorities. Isaacs gave a brief history of Yiddish in modern times, starting from the late 19th Century. She said that as the Enlightenment spread throughout Europe, Ashkenazi Jews (Jews living in Europe) underwent large and quick changes in lifestyle, transforming from a life focused on religion and community to one much more cosmopolitan.

"Jewish thinkers were foremost in understanding the implications of modernity, both good and bad," Isaacs said. "Included in their ranks were the first linguists and anthropologists."

With Modernity, Yiddish had been transformed from a vernacular into a sophisticated language of literature and theater. There were and still are Yiddish authors, Yiddish newspapers and Yiddish plays. Yiddish was also involved with significant political movements in Europe and the United States.

Isaacs expanded on the question of whether Yiddish is a "dying language". She said that its position as the primary language of most Jews was permanently damaged by the Holocaust, in which 5 million of the 6 million Jews killed were Yiddish speakers.

Isaacs also recounted the decades-long 20th century struggle between Yiddish and Hebrew, a struggle to define the linguistic identity of Jews. Hebrew speakers often considered Yiddish to be a remnant of the Diaspora – a language of persecution that did not deserve pride. Yiddish speakers, on the other hand, wanted to retain a part of the spoken and literary heritage of the Ashkenazi Jews in Europe.

Now, while Hebrew has become the native language for millions of Jews in Israel, Isaacs said that Yiddish is the primary language for only some tens of thousands of people, mostly ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. However, the language is taught at some universities, and there exist a number of organizations that try to preserve Yiddish.

Isaacs also brought up the interesting fact of non-Jews learning and speaking Yiddish. On a Yiddish program in Lithuania that Isaacs attended last summer, about half of the students and teachers were not Jewish.

"While Yiddish has gone out of fashion for many Jews," Isaacs said, "quite a few non-Jews have begun to study it."

In Poland, Germany, Lithuania and other European countries, there are Yiddish-centered cultural institutions and university courses in the language. Isaacs said that one interpretation she has for this desire to study Yiddish is as a "gesture of good will."

"There’s an awareness that Yiddish was brutally destroyed in Europe, and that this is a way of showing in a very meaningful way a respect for the language," Isaacs said.

Isaacs also discussed how her involvement in the preservation of Yiddish has endeared her to the struggles of other people trying to preserve their languages. She described the pains of a native Lakota teacher who was interested in the revival of the Hebrew language.

"When I described the process," Isaacs said, "That it had taken dedicated effort for the better part of a century to bring Hebrew to where it is as a modern language, he became disheartened. Lakota, he told me, did not have that much time."

Isaacs said that too many schools were not interested in preserving the languages of their minority cultures, and merely tried to make everyone learn English. She saw a similar assimilationist attitude during a recent trip to Mexico. While there, Isaacs met a family of indigenous Zapotec speakers in Tenochtitlan. Isaacs said a man told her how his children were embarrassed to speak Zapotec, and that the parents have to send them to a Spanish-language school in another city, Oaxaca.

"What really struck me was the sense of shame on the part of the kids – that they’re embarrassed by their parents, and how frustrated the parents are that this is the reality that they have," Isaacs said.

In Mexico City, Isaacs visited a Spanish-language Jewish school that also teaches Hebrew and Yiddish. When the students at the school asked her why they should be learning Yiddish, Isaacs responded that having its own language gives a group a feeling of peoplehood and shared heritage.

"It occurred to me that when we speak a different language, it’s how you define ‘us’ and ‘them’. And when your own language becomes a ‘them’ language, then you’ve cut yourself off from prior generations – in attitude as well as in comprehensibility," Isaacs said. "People are perfectly capable of being multilingual… But in order to keep multilingualism going, one must give those languages a purpose."
To see a podcast of this lecture, click here to go to the National Museum of Language podcast.

February 2009

Ninging the praises of My Friends - Spanish for Native Speakers
An interview with Sara Urquhart
By Belinda A. Sauret

So, why are you reading about Spanish for Native Speakers on the Internet? Wouldn’t it be faster to go to the teacher next door and ask her what to do with the students who struggle to tell “hogar” from “ahogar” when they read. Why not just turn to the new and fun SNS activities section of your regular Spanish textbook? Or, maybe you could flip back through the SNS chapter of your foreign language methods class text.
In your dreams, right? In my dreams, come to think about it. And, as it turns out, in Sara Urquhart’s dreams too.
This year, not far from the vineyards and farms in Newburg, Oregon, Sara started a program new to her school to develop the academic reading and writing skills of her native speaker students in Spanish. For this class she has no colleagues, no curriculum, no statewide objectives, no prerequisites, no placement tests, no texts, nor even enough desks for her 37 SNS students; all this to help her teach a class the other Spanish teachers turned down with a “No, thanks!”
Sara, however, did not see anything in front of her that was much more difficult than the duties she had discharged in her two years as a Peace Corps worker in Macedonia, and this first year teacher undertook her task with little more than daily writing prompts and the Dibels literacy scale. Even with 160 students and three other preparations, Sara has managed to find considerable joy in the creativity that preparing these classes allows her. She has helped them build their confidence in using Spanish in an academic setting, so much so that her students have even written two essays in that language.
It certainly wasn’t a lack of preparation that left Sara having to resort to finding whatever newspaper and magazine articles, poems or stories she thought her students might find compelling. Before she graduated from Virginia Tech in 2005, she had taken a methods class with Dr. Judith Shrum, one of the authors of the reputable “Teachers Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction”. But even that text had, she says, only a few pages on instruction for native speakers, so Sara was pretty much on her own.
Sara set out to conferences, and at one of them, COFLT, a regional languages conference, she met Mary Ann Casas, also a new teacher, trying to find or develop suitable units and measures of achievement for a class on heritage speakers of Spanish at Centennial High School, not far from Gresham, Oregon. Mary Ann, already a big fan of social networking sites, had set up http://teachingsns.ning.com/ also known as “My Friends - Spanish for Native Speakers”. Teachers who wish to take part in the dialogue on the site only need to submit their name and email address on the first visit to the site. Soon a confirmation message will allow access.
Mary Ann had spent too many evenings staring down her computer screen in search of helpful ideas for her SNS students. The helpful people at teachers.net had loads of experience in L2 language teaching, but SNS was and is another matter.
Mary Ann and later other SNS teachers began to post useful information on the site: videos, photos, websites with appealing readings, jokes or comic strips. But best of all, the forum allows all the 119 (and counting) members to plead for help. A question about making a unit on Latin American legends has brought seven replies; one about devising a lesson on coming to the U.S. has brought five helpful references to books, authors and Internet available websites. Latin Food units, history of the Spanish language, and even managing a classroom all figure as discussion topics on the forum.
Certainly, many readers will already be familiar with listservs like FLTeach (you can sign up at http://www.cortland.edu/flteach/ and listservs that address the needs of teachers of specific classes like AP Spanish Language or AP Spanish Literature (http://it.stlawu.edu/~rgol/AP-Spanish ), but for other teachers who are in the vanguard of teaching native speakers of Spanish in the public schools, there is one Ning for us.