Many migrant communities in the United States have set up extracurricular schools and programs to teach students their heritage language. As a primary immigrant gateway to the US, Los Angeles has schools teaching languages from all over the world: Armenian to Russian, Chinese to Bengali. All of these schools face similar challenges: How can they encourage heritage language maintenance in a society that is hostile to immigrant multilingualism? How do they find appropriate materials and train teachers in effective pedagogy? How can they run a school with a staff that consists mostly or entirely of volunteers?
This conference, organized by the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, will bring together teachers, administrators, and parents at community language schools as well as academics to try to find answers to these questions. It will include presentations from researchers investigating different aspects of community language schools and a panel of administrators and teachers sharing best practices and seeking solutions to common problems. The NHLRC hopes that this conference will spark dialogue about how community language schools can work together and with outside institutions to advance the goal of heritage language development.
We thank the G.E. Von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies for their support.