34.2669, Review: The Acquisition of Heritage Languages

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2669. Mon Sep 11 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2669, Review: The Acquisition of Heritage Languages

Moderators: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Daniel Swanson, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Zackary Leech, Lynzie Coburn, Natasha Singh, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 25-Jun-2023
From: Lorena Hernandez Ramirez [lorenaherram at gmail.com]
Subject: Applied Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics: Montrul (2022) 


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.396

AUTHOR: Silvina Montrul
TITLE: The Acquisition of Heritage Languages
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Lorena Hernandez Ramirez

SUMMARY

“The Acquisition of Heritage Languages” by Silvina Montrul is a
comprehensive and fundamental toolkit for anyone who wants to have a
better understanding of a highly complex discipline, regardless of
having previous knowledge of it or not.

Before the introductory chapter, the readers are presented with a
table of contents, a list of figures and tables used throughout the
book, and the acknowledgments.

Chapter 1 (“Introduction”) provides some fundamental notions on
language acquisition and establishes the focus of the book, which is
the grammatical development of heritage languages and the language
learning trajectory of heritage speakers, including a summary of the
research on the field conducted in the last twenty years. The author
advances the notion of heritage languages as native languages,
influenced by environmental, sociopolitical, and academic
circumstances.

Chapter 2 (“Heritage languages and heritage speakers”) presents
definitions of heritage languages and heritage speakers as used in the
book, and these are contrasted with and expanded on other definitions
typically used in the US. The controversies behind the use of the term
“heritage”, although briefly, are discussed as well. The author
defines heritage speakers as “early bilinguals of minority languages”.
The contrast between heritage speakers and heritage language learners
is also presented. The chapter also includes a section about heritage
language communities, which is broken down into immigrant communities
and nonimmigrant minority communities. A final section discusses other
heritage speakers such as simultaneous and sequential bilingual
children, returnees, and international adoptees.

Chapter 3 (“The language of heritage speakers”) offers general
observations of common linguistic traits of heritage languages and
their speakers’ linguistic skills, namely in regards to vocabulary,
morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse pragmatics, and phonetics and
phonology. Recent and older studies are compared for this purpose,
including different heritage speaker populations from around the
world. Comparing different languages and social environments, a
pattern that emerges is erosion and simplification in terms of
vocabulary, morphology, and syntax, whereas this phenomenon is the
opposite for phonetic and phonological aspects. The author concludes
that how the language was acquired, in addition to individual and
contextual factors, influence language development.

Chapter 4 (“The bilingual development of heritage speakers”) is
divided into five sections. The author recommends that readers
familiar with the topics skip the first three sections, since they
present basic facts and concepts related to bilingual language
acquisition, emergence vs. acquisition and mastery of different
properties of language, and age of acquisition and attrition. Section
four presents contextual factors that interact with the
psycholinguistic and socio-affective development of heritage speakers
from birth to adulthood. The last section includes a thorough
description of final implications derived from all the aspects
discussed above, which will be discussed in subsequent chapters. One
of the main implications is that heritage speakers are a type of
native speaker because of their exposure to the language early in
life, often from birth.

Chapter 5 (“Theoretical approaches”) offers an overview of theoretical
approaches to first and second language acquisition that have been
applied to research on heritage language acquisition and loss.
Heritage speakers are presented as a unique source of information to
understand languages. The theories revised in the chapter include
those involving native language acquisition (universal grammar,
emergentism, and variationist sociolinguistics), second language
acquisition (focusing on linguistic and cognitive factors, as well as
sociolinguistic ones), and heritage language acquisition
(sociolinguistic perspectives, formal linguistics, emergentism, and
processability theory).

Chapter 6 (“Methodological considerations”) highlights a series of
issues that arise when conducting research on heritage speakers. It
provides an overview of the most common methods and designs used up to
the date of publication of this book (originally 2016, this new paper
copy edition is from 2022). The author focuses on the importance of
deciding the ideal baseline group and establishing biographical traits
and level of proficiency using background questionnaires and
proficiency measures. The research design must account for the
research questions, the theory, and theoretical assumptions. The
author also highlights the scarcity of research on less commonly
studied languages and lack of baseline measures as one of the main
challenges. She also points out the necessity of adapting and creating
culturally appropriate tests for these languages, and the importance
of new data analysis methods that reflect individual variability.

In Chapters 7 and 8 Montrul returns to the notion of heritage speakers
being a type of native speaker and expands on this concept. In Chapter
7 (“How native are heritage speakers?”) heritage speakers are compared
to monolingual or bilingual native speakers with full proficiency in
the language in order to see how they differ, and also to observe the
effect of early input in a dual language context. The author
establishes that heritage speakers with very high proficiency are not
the majority, and those with lower proficiency display grammatical
patterns that reflect insufficient input rather than being affected by
quality of input. Chapter 8 (“Are heritage speakers like second
language learners?”) presents examples of research on the linguistic
knowledge of heritage learners and L2 learners. It first overviews
some research issues that can also be applied to heritage language
acquisition (such as transfer and fossilization, amongst others) and,
in the last part, it concentrates on the teaching of heritage
languages in the classroom and how heritage language learners can
benefit from it.

Finally, Chapter 9 (“Some implications”) extensively highlights and
reviews all the implications that understanding heritage language
acquisition has for theoretical claims about language and
bilingualism, language education, and language policies. This chapter
is the most sociolinguistic in nature, and therefore ties up to the
initial claim of the importance of researching heritage languages and
speakers, given the current economic and geopolitical changes,
globalization, and increasingly recent immigration in different parts
of the world. After this final chapter, a list of references and an
index of terms are provided.

EVALUATION

Based on Montrul’s own statement at the beginning of the book, namely,
that there is “no comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-science
of heritage language acquisition up to date” (11: 2022), this book is
a strong attempt at filling this gap in the discipline and clearly
achieves this goal. Even though since 2016 there has been an increase
in research given the growing scholarly interest in heritage languages
and heritage speakers, this volume constitutes a fundamental piece of
work for anyone interested in having a clear grasp and understanding
of heritage languages, their learners, and their acquisition. No prior
knowledge of the field is generally required, and some concepts are
reviewed throughout the book for those who are not familiar with the
field. For those with some background in second language acquisition,
that same knowledge can be applied to heritage languages. For those
without any background in second language acquisition, the book offers
a window into the field.

This publication fits with other literature in the topic as a
comprehensive stepping stone for anyone wanting to learn the
fundamentals (and beyond) of heritage languages, their learners, and
heritage language acquisition. Some of the main issues pinpointed in
the book have been later addressed by the author in other
publications, given her extensive expertise in language acquisition,
bilingualism, and heritage language acquisition.

One of the strengths of the book is the significant amount of data
that it provides from different languages around the world (Spanish,
Japanese, Korean, among others) in a heritage language context. The
review of the research on the topic up to the date of the original
2016 publication is also commendable, and it serves as an inspiration
for further research, as the author notes the aspects that need
further development. Amongst others, the complexity of the term
“heritage” and its implications must be analyzed in further detail,
along with some concepts such as “majority”, “minority”, and “language
dominance”, given the importance of the sociopolitical component of
how heritage languages and speakers are viewed and their necessities
addressed in the larger spectrum of language acquisition and learning.

Unlike many authors, Montrul not only advances the idea of heritage
languages and speakers as native, but also the idea that there is no
need to have a theory specifically for heritage language acquisition.
Specific insights can be drawn from a variety of existing language
acquisition theories, given the variety of circumstances that affect
the development of heritage languages and their acquisition. Heritage
speakers present a wide variety of individual profiles. However, a
common trait of the vast majority is that they are generally dominant
in the majority language, whereas the level of proficiency in the
heritage language can vary enormously, from receptive skills to highly
fluent speech, and a whole myriad of levels in-between.

Most of the examples provided in the book refer to the co-existence of
heritage speakers/learners with L2 learners in the same classroom,
without focusing specifically on those tracks or programs that offer
classes exclusively for heritage language learners. This relates to a
current trend for Spanish advanced by authors such as Pascual y Cabo
and Prada (2018), García and Alonso (2021), and Bayona and
García-Martín (2022), amongst others, that advances the need for
classrooms with heritage learners and second language learners,
promoting a blending of the teaching approaches, and going against the
traditional separation of these two student populations.

This book is a necessary and long-needed contribution to the trending
topic of heritage language acquisition. It helps the reader to better
understand the processes involved as well as the variety of
circumstances surrounding heritage languages and the characteristics
of their speakers and the contexts in which they exist.

REFERENCES

Bayona, Patricia and Elena García-Martín. 2022. Second Language and
Heritage Learners in Mixed Classrooms. Multilingual Matters.

García, Ofelia and Lara Alonso. 2021. Reconstituting U.S. Spanish
language education:
U.S. Latinx occupying classrooms. of Spanish Language Teaching, DOI:
10.1080/23247797.2021.2016230

Pascual y Cabo, Diego and Josh Prada. 2018. Redefining Spanish
teaching and learning in the
United States. Foreign Language Annals;51:533–547.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Currently Co-Director of the Language Program in Spanish and
Portuguese at New York University, my research interests include
second language and heritage language acquisition, language teaching
methods, sociolinguistics, and language ideologies.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please consider donating to the Linguist List https://give.myiu.org/iu-bloomington/I320011968.html


LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

American Dialect Society/Duke University Press http://dukeupress.edu

Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group) http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Brill http://www.brill.com

Cambridge Scholars Publishing http://www.cambridgescholars.com/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Dictionary Society of North America http://dictionarysociety.com/

Edinburgh University Press www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

Georgetown University Press http://www.press.georgetown.edu

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Linguistic Association of Finland http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications

Springer Nature http://www.springer.com

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2669
----------------------------------------------------------