No subject

[Scott McGinnis]

Heritage Languages in America: Second National Conference
Washington, D.C.
February/March 2002

The Second National Conference on Heritage Languages in America will be
held in Washington, D.C. in February/March, 2002. The conference is
being organized by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and the
National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), with support from the
University of Maryland, College Park.

In addition to the general sessions, participants will have
opportunities to meet with special interest constituencies, based on
instructional settings, language, and other common concerns. As with the
First National Conference, there will also be poster sessions. The call
for poster session proposals will be made in April 2001.

Information about the conference will be disseminated on a regular basis
through the heritage languages listserv, heritage-list. Individuals
wishing to subscribe to that list should contact Scott McGinnis at the
National Foreign Language Center (e-mail smcginnis at nflc.org; phone
202-637-8881 x28; fax 202-637-9244). Please pass on this information to
others that you think might be interested in the conference.

Building from the foundation of the First National Conference, convened
in October 1999 in Long Beach, California, the Second National
Conference will seek to further the aims of the Heritage Languages
Initiative, a national effort to develop the languages of our heritage
communities. It will bring together heritage language community and
school leaders, representatives from pre-K-12 schools and colleges and
universities, world-renowned researchers, and federal and state
policymakers. The goals of the Heritage Languages Initiative and the
conference are to continue to make manifest the economic and social
benefits to our nation of heritage language preservation, and to work
toward collective approaches to the development of all heritage language
programs.

"Competence in languages other than English is desperately needed in the
United States. Our huge and varied heritage language resources have a
definite role to play in arriving at such competence."
Joshua Fishman, Yeshiva and Stanford Universities