professional development \
startalk workshop \
2015 workshop
Faculty
Maria Carreira is a professor of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach. She was the co-organizer of the first national conference on heritage languages (1999). She is the co-author of a first-year textbook for Spanish (2004) and of a book for heritage speakers of Spanish. Her research interests include phonology, Spanish in the U.S., sociolinguistics, heritage languages, and educational linguistics. Carreira designed a curriculum for heritage speakers of Spanish for Westminster High School (Westminster, CA) pursuant to a Department of Education Title VII grant. She is the co-director of two of the National Heritage Language Resource Center's projects: designing a generic curriculum and creating language-specific materials for heritage language instruction. She is also a co-author of the preliminary report on the NHLRC's survey of college-level heritage learners.
Claire Chik is the associate director of the Title VI National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, with responsibilities that include organizing and presenting at conferences, workshops, and research institutes. Chik also edits articles for the Heritage Language Journal, and guest edited a special issue (2013, Vol. 10, No. 2). She is currently editing a volume for Routledge tentatively titled, A Handbook on Heritage Language Education: From Innovation to Program Building (2016; Olga Kagan, Maria Carreira, Claire Chik, Eds.) Chik is also currently involved in designing an online certificate in heritage language education. She received her Ph.D. in applied linguistics from UCLA, writing a dissertation that focused on heritage language maintenance at a Chinese community school.
Olga Kagan is a professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, director of the Title VI National Heritage Language Resource Center and the Center for World languages, UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from the Pushkin Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia. Her main research interests are in the field of applied linguistics and include language loss and maintenance by heritage language learners. In the past several years she has been working on developing curricula that would allow heritage learners to regain and improve their language competencies. She is the co-author of twelve textbooks, both for heritage speakers of Russian and learners of Russian as a foreign language. She is co-editor of Teaching and Learning of Slavic Languages and Cultures (Slavica Publishers,
2000) that received an award for the Best Contribution to Pedagogy from AATSEEL and the volume Heritage language Education: A New Field Emerging (Routledge, 2008). Kagan is the founding editor of the Heritage Language Journal. In January 2015 she received an MLA Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession.