Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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From research to teacher education: Moving beyond 'lip service'

A call has been made to bridge the gap between heritage language (HL) research and teaching practices (Polinsky, 2016). In this presentation, I discuss three areas that can potentially help us move forward toward addressing this gap. First, we still need studies that address the dynamics involved in adult HL learning. While we have crosslinguistic evidence of vulnerable linguistic structures in HL acquisition, we still know little about the interactions between these linguistic features and other variables that conspire in adult language learning (e.g., pedagogical interventions, individual differences). Second, we must continue to communicate findings to practitioners so they can choose relevant information to make informed decisions about their local teaching context. However, teachers ought to test how these findings translate into their classrooms. Action research can be a promising tool to help teachers gather information on how their students respond to pedagogical interventions. Lastly, we need data on the efficacy of teacher education training in transforming teachers' practices with HL learners in the classroom. For example, case studies of teachers new to a task-based language teaching approach suggest that workshops do not necessarily lead to profound changes in teaching practices. Thus, teachers may need support in implementing the use of innovative pedagogical techniques in their classrooms.