Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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Principles of research-informed pedagogy for heritage learners

This presentation discusses principles of research-informed pedagogy for heritage learners (HLs), using as examples activities from an existing curriculum and a heritage language textbook for Russian. Our approach to heritage language pedagogy is based on the idea of helping HLs develop appropriate form-meaning connections, which they often lack in their heritage language. As current research has made evident, heritage speakers across many different languages often lack native-like control of certain morpho-syntactic features (e.g. as verbal and nominal inflections, particles, complementizers, determiners, etc.,), i.e., features that they often perceive as “the small stuff” of language. These deficits make the HLs linguistic system unstable and often insufficient to allow for a successful and meaningful expression of ideas in the heritage language. We propose a pedagogical approach based on identifying linguistic lacunae and assessing the likely sources of the problem (e.g. low frequency, low salience, lack of one-to-one mapping, dominant language transfer, lexical gap, etc.), and suggest a set of interventionist activities that help HLs build connections between the form and the meaning. This can be achieved through: 1) development of metalinguistic awareness and analysis which actively tap into the existing abilities of HLs; 2) explicit conceptual explanations with focus-on-form activities; 3) all of which happen in the context of communicative function.