Heritage Language Teaching & Learning

 The Language Resource Center is pleased to announce that on Wednesday May 6th at 2:00 in 255 IAB (SIPA Building) Dr. Maria Carreira is going to give a presentation on  heritage language teaching and learning.

In her presentation she will report on the results of the National Heritage Language Survey and discuss the implications of these results for heritage language teaching and learning. Funded by a grant from the US Department of Education, the survey was designed to inform the development of curricula, materials, and professional development projects in the heritage languages. The survey offers an unprecedented look at the linguistic profiles, goals, and attitudes of 1800 college-level heritage language learners (HLLs) across different languages and geographic regions in the United States.

The responses reveal key commonalities among all HLLs and HL teaching contexts and point to key priorities in heritage language teaching, including developing curricula and pedagogical strategies that a) are learner-centered and respond to the needs of students at different levels of readiness, b) connect to local HL communities and resources, and c) focus on the development of literacy skills.

Dr. Carreira is a professor at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at California State University, Long Beach. She is also co-director, with Olga Kagan, of the heritage language materials development project at UCLA, a project funded by the Department of Education. She is the co-author of two Spanish textbooks, Nexos, a first-year text and Sí se puede, a textbook for teaching Spanish to native speakers. Her publications focus on US Spanish, heritage language teaching, Spanish as a world language, and Spanish phonology. She has been an invited speaker at various summer institutes for heritage languages, including, most recently at the South East Asian Summer Languages Institute (SASLI) at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, where she conducted a seminar for instructors of heritage language teachers in the languages of south East Asia. She is currently editing a special issue of the Heritage Languages Journal on identity in heritage language teaching and learning.