[HERITAGE-LIST] FYI: Article from INSIDE HIGHER ED (15 December 2006)

[Scott G. McGINNIS]

With thanks to Donna Christian at CAL for the tip:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/12/15/heritage 

I've only included the first couple paragraphs here, as I suspect many of you have already seen or received this via other sources.

Happy holidays to all,
sm


Scott McGinnis
Academic Advisor & Associate Professor

Defense Language Institute, 
  Washington Office
201 12th Street S., Suite 507
Arlington, VA 22202-4306
phone:  703-604-0464  fax:  703-604-0466
e-mail: Scott.McGinnis at belvoir.army.mil
  OR smcginni at umd.edu




When Foreign Language Isn’t Foreign 

Vanessa Fonseca, now a graduate teaching assistant in the University of New Mexico’s Sabine Ulibarrí Spanish as a Heritage Language program, said it took her all of two minutes to figure out a non-heritage Spanish class she stumbled into as an undergraduate was not for her.

It wasn’t just that Fonseca and her sister comprised two of the three Hispanic students in a class of about two dozen. It was also that once her fellow students started speaking, Fonseca, who had been exposed to the language as a child largely through her grandparents’ conversations, in addition to her schoolwork, realized that she’d been misplaced. The other students were at a different level, she said. Not higher, not lower. Just different.