Response to inquiry: Definition of "heritage learner"

[Scott McGinnis]

From: "Harold Ormsby L." <hormsby at terra.com.mx>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 21:09:33 -0600

Due to a pile of work, this has to be quick. I reserve the right to
contradict
myself later.

(1) All languages have something to do with "heritage" one way or another.
So,
referring to a "heritage language" could easily become meaningless.

(2)  "Heritage learner" is much more concrete. However, as has been pointed
out
,
"heritage learners" (plural) do not constitute a homogenous group by any
stretc
h
of the imagination. E.g., talking about what heritage learners need becomes
hopelessly complex very quickly.

(3) "Heritage user" is also heterogeneous. One hopes, however, that every
"heritage learner" will at some point become a "heritage user" -- with the
idea
of "life-long-learning" thrown in just to keep the pot boiling.

(4) "Heritage teacher" is someone we all know and love, very concrete in
many
senses. And heritage teachers are people some of us are called on to
educate/train. And that requires us (educators/trainers) to take some very
concrete decisions, in hopes of doing, at worst, as little damage as
possible.

It seems to me that, for all that can be said of languages, learners and
users,
the functional (and reasonably definable) difference between "heritage" and
"non-heritage" is to be found in what teachers are expected to do in the
classroom (and that, I assure you, is a lot more than "just" (!) language
teaching).

Heritage teachers have to, inter alia:

(a) Do a lot of individualization; individualization implies understanding
individual students;

(b) Come up with materials that no one ever thought of doing before;

(c) Analyse their language from novel points of view;

(d) ditto their (language's) culture;

(e) At a personal level, deal with their own relationship with their
heritage
language/culture so as not to mess up any given student's relationship with
tha
t
same language/culture;

(f) Be able to set achievable teaching goals and know how to evaluate
whether
those goals were achieved; and know what to do when they weren't or were.

I think that by focussing on teachers (and their education and training --
even
in very "odd" circumstances), the concept of "heritage" becomes more
manageable
from all sorts of points of view.
-----   -----
Harold Ormsby L.
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Fax:  (+52)  5  662 9227
<hormsby at terra.com.mx>