Heritage Speakers

[Susan Bauckus]

Dear Colleagues,

I write in response to Susanna Nazarova's query about heritage speakers and to anyone else in the SEELANGS community who is interested. I work for the UCLA Center for World Languages and the National Heritage Language Resource Center, a joint project of CWL and  the UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching. Olga Kagan (UCLA) is NHLRC's director and Kathleen Dillon (UC Davis) is the associate director. NHLRC was established to address the need for heritage language research that can serve as the basis for sound pedagogy. 

Here are a few resources:

1) Russian for Russians (2002, Slavica Publishers), by Olga Kagan, Tatiana Akishina, and Richard Robin, is a textbook written for heritage speakers of Russian. The book has a website housed at George Washington University, at http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/rdr/

2) The NHLRC website (www.nhlrc.ucla.edu) has a set of resources including a bibliography, guidelines for heritage instruction and curriculum, and presentations given at the 2002 Heritage Language Institute and the 2006 Heritage Language Research Institute. 

3) The Heritage Language Journal (www.heritagelanguages.org) is an on-line academic journal focusing on heritage language knowledge and speakers. HLJ is published by CWL and the UC Consortium. We will publish an issue shortly on Russian as a heritage language, guest edited by David Andrews of Georgetown University, but articles on any language are informative. The Bilingual Research Journal (http://brj.asu.edu/) frequently publishes articles on heritage language as well.

5) some individual works: a) a SEEJ article (Kagan and Dillon) on Russian heritage programs is reprinted in Vol. 1 of the Heritage Language Journal, and the first volume of SEEJ's 50th anniversary issue (Spring, 2006) has an article by the same authors. Joan Chevalier's article about teaching reading to heritage speakers is in Volume 3 of HLJ. b) A 2000 Slavica volume, The Learning and Teaching of Slavic Languages has a chapter on heritage language learning and teaching. The introduction to that chapter is written by Guadalupe Valdés of Stanford University, who is an early researcher of heritage speakers, and it is intended as a general introduction to the field for Slavists. c) Maria Polinsky, a linguist whose research interests include heritage speakers, has a number of her papers on line at: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lingdept/f_polinsky.html 
d) the volume Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging was published this year and will soon be reprinted in paperback.

6) UCLA's Russian program has an entire heritage track for Russian speakers. Other institutions have separate classes or programs, or have faculty with experience teaching heritage speakers, and I hope they will chime in. 

Incidentally, we are currently trying to find out who in the U.S. teaches heritage speakers and who has heritage-specific classes or programs so if anyone does, I'd love to hear from you. 

Please feel free to contact Dr. Kagan (okagan at humnet.ucla.edu). In addition, I'd like to know which of these suggestions are the most useful to you, if you don't mind telling me. 

Regards,
Susan Bauckus
UCLA Center for World Languages/
National Heritage Language Resource Center



Susan Bauckus
UCLA Center for World Languages
www.international.ucla.edu
Heritage Language Journal
www.heritagelanguages.org
Language Materials Project
www.lmp.ucla.edu
LA Language World
www.lalamag.ucla.edu

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