Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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Beyond academic language: Creative writing for empowering heritage identities

Academic language has been identified as the area where heritage learners need the most support. However, as part of the expanding goals of heritage language courses (Valdés & Parra, forthcoming 2017), some scholars (e.g. Leeman & Serafini, 2016; Martínez, 2005) argue that by restricting curriculum to the teaching of academic literacy, the field is missing the opportunity of tapping into broader and richer linguistic resources, part of heritage speakers bilingual repertoires. Conceiving the teaching of oral and written heritage languages within a broader understanding of literacy, to include a variety of “genres", opens up the possibility for students to explore linguistic, interpersonal dimensions (Hyland, 2002) and issues of identity that can't be elicited through academic writing tasks. In this presentation, I will look at the benefits of including creative writing tasks—with an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, literary tropes and poetry—for the teaching of Spanish as heritage language. I will share some of the creative writing projects—rich descriptions, poetry, personal essays and speech of acceptance—of advanced Spanish heritage students. For each genre, I will elaborate on specific pedagogical goals and task outcomes.