PROGRAM: Poster Sessions

Saturday, October 19, 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM

HERITAGE LANGUAGE SPEAKERS AND LEARNERS

3 Generational Link Model: A Conceptual Framework
The 3 Generational Link Model emerged as the graphic representation of a study of how storytelling helps sustain and maintain historical, cultural, and family links among Filipino American grandparents, parents, and children. It also serves as a graphic representation of how, as a rule, most non-English-speaking immigrants to the United States, including Filipinos, lose their heritage languages within two to three generations. The model symbolizes the significant role of communicating in the parents and grandparents’ native languages as it promotes the preservation of the immigrant groups’ stories and culture.

Advanced Speakers: What Makes a Difference?
For years teachers have known intuitively that the linguistic characteristics of heritage Spanish learners are different from those of foreign language students even when their levels of proficiency are comparable. This study identifies the different characteristics of the oral production of these two groups. The results contribute to the development of an effective approach to the teaching of Spanish to heritage Spanish speakers.

Attitudes Toward and Effort in Heritage Language Development Among Korean Americans
To determine the extent of heritage language maintenance among Korean Americans, 251 first-generation Korean immigrants were surveyed. While parents who encourage English use at home generally provide support for their children’s English literacy skills development, those who favor the use of Korean at home do not necessarily read Korean to their children or send them to weekend Korean schools. Implications of this disparity between attitudes toward and behaviors in heritage language education are discussed.

Do Chinese Heritage Learners Have an Advantage?
A longitudinal empirical study was conducted at a major university in the Midwestern United States to investigate whether exposure to spoken Chinese at home gives students an advantage in learning Chinese as a second language in formal education settings. The data (students’ vocabulary knowledge and language performance on listening, reading, speaking, and writing) were collected from heritage and nonheritage students at three different periods of second-year Chinese learning. The presentation discusses the findings and implications for teaching Chinese as a second language to heritage learners.

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How to Improve the Knowledge Base of Heritage Speakers
The study is based on three experiments that test heritage speakers’ knowledge of parts of speech, morphological constraints, and lexical co-occurrence rules of Russian. The main implications are as follows: grammatical competence of heritage speakers can be assessed through lexical proficiency tests; the pedagogical placement of heritage students can be based primarily on their lexical knowledge; and vocabulary enhancement should play a crucial role in the heritage language curriculum.

Latent Speakers: Activating Heritage/Ancestral Language Skills
The presenters examine linguistic and social aspects of second language acquisition by adults in Utah, California, and Alaska who have been exposed to a language as children but do not speak it. They compare language learner experiences and strategies and discuss implications for language revitalization and second language teaching.

"Mi Madre Medise Cestoy Loco"
Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) students at the University of New Mexico show evidence of internalized Spanish grammar as well as evidence of English influence in their written assignments. This paper defines and documents two categories of variation from standard written Spanish in the e-mail writing assignments of SHL 101 students: variants demonstrating English influence, and variants demonstrating internalized Spanish grammar. The paper discusses the implications of the findings.

Rearticulating Language and Culture to Negotiate Identity
This study explores how university students have negotiated their identities throughout their lives by rearticulating the relationship between their heritage languages and English and between heritage culture and school culture. The study focuses on second generation and 1.5 generation immigrant non-White students who have come from Asian backgrounds, have experienced the educational process (K—12) in southern states, and are pursuing a postsecondary degree in a southern university.

Rethinking the Definition of the Heritage Language Learner
This study examines yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese Americans) and mixed heritage Japanese language learners and their conceptualization of ethnic identity in relation to learning Japanese. Results of the study indicate that even though these learners had a very limited exposure to the language outside the educational system, they have developed a strong sense of their heritage and their ethnic identity through learning Japanese. The presenter argues that such learners should be included in the definitions of heritage language learners and proposes a tentative definition that includes these learners.

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Chicago’s Heritage Language Teacher Corps
This poster describes a FIPSE-sponsored collaboration between the Chicago Public Schools and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The program offers in-service teachers three masters-level courses related to the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language: literature, sociolinguistics, and methods. Its purpose is to prepare teachers in accordance with several of the necessary competencies for teaching SNS outlined by the AATSP, including principles in language expansion and enrichment, knowledge of the sociolinguistic dynamics of Spanish as a system of communication in the United States, and understanding of students’ home cultures. This model will hopefully contribute to the creation of standards for teaching SNS and that it can be adapted to other undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs.

Heritage Language Education at the University of California: Policy and Practice
This poster session includes a profile of the current state of heritage language instruction on the UC campuses, a summary of the most current scholarly research in the field, and the preliminary guidelines formulated for the UC system. The new UC-sponsored online Heritage Language Journal is also highlighted.

Heritage Language Teaching Certificate, California State University, Fullerton
Effective teacher training is critical for the success of both the teacher and student in the classroom setting. Typical heritage language teachers may lack the classroom and teaching experience necessary for creating a positive learning environment. They face problems with management, curriculum design, assessment, and integrating technology into course content. The CSUF Heritage Language Teaching Certificate addresses these needs by offering a comprehensive professional development program designed specifically for the heritage language teacher.

Master of Arts in Hebrew Education
This poster session describes a new program that aims to train Hebrew teachers for all Jewish educational settings. It includes the rationale behind the program and gives a full description of the academic training process. It shows how this model can create new standards for teaching heritage languages within the heritage learning framework and how it can be adapted to other graduate programs for teacher training in heritage languages.

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Building on Our Strengths: Springfield’s Model
See how a mid-sized urban district is meeting the challenge of a Spanish for Heritage Speakers program with help from a Foreign Language Assistance Program grant. Results from Year I of a Spanish for Heritage Speakers curriculum development workshop are shared. The workshop addresses course descriptions, materials, placements tests, a scheduling flowchart, curriculum maps, and oral/written year-end assessments. Plans for Year II are shared.

Collaboration of Heritage and Non-Heritage Language Learners in a Classroom
This poster session, based on a 1-year ethnographic study in a college-level Korean-language class, describes how heritage and non-heritage language learners have deepened their appreciation of each other’s motivations for, and perspectives on, learning Korean. It draws attention to the fact that heritage and non-heritage learners can facilitate each other’s language development.

Colloquial Chinese Reader and Chinese Heritage Students
This poster session presents the issues that were addressed in the process of developing materials for Chinese heritage students at the college level. It also demonstrates pedagogical activities that were designed with the unique nature of heritage language learners in mind. The presenter uses the book Colloquial Chinese Reader that she authored as an example.

Creating YLFAN (The Yiddish Language and Folk Arts Network)
Yiddish is an endangered heritage language. Founded in 2001, YLFAN reunites Yiddish-speaking scholars and artists with American Jewish communities. An initiative of The Solidarity Foundation (a research and information agency affiliated with the Native American Council of New York City), it draws on Solidarity’s work on language retention. The issues behind YLFAN’s creation, examples of YLFAN programs, and the experience of creating a new kind of creative and scholarly organization to support Yiddish are presented.

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Critical Language Awareness for Heritage Language Learners
Because language instruction can implicitly denigrate non-prestige varieties of the language, critical language awareness is crucial for heritage language learners and instructors. Spanish in the United States is a university course designed to promote critical language awareness and linguistic development in Spanish. The course covers language variation, language ideologies, language and identity, language policy, and bilingual education through readings and analysis of linguistic and sociolinguistic data.

Developing Heritage Languages in Philadelphia
Several elementary schools in the Philadelphia school district are developing language programs that promote additive bilingualism for heritage language speakers in Spanish, Khmer, Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese. This poster shares these language plans and illustrates a range of ways that elementary schools can develop language resources in their communities.

The Development and Impact of Heritage Language Education: An Ethnographic Study
This ethnographic study illustrates the value of family and community involvement in promoting language proficiency in heritage language populations and explores language education methods practiced in the Chinese community language schools in San Diego. The intricate factors affecting heritage language learning are examined and the potential uses of technology in assisting young learners in acquiring literacy in their heritage language are explored. Guidelines for designing computer-based programs to facilitate heritage language acquisition are shared.

The Development of Spanish Orthography: A Computer-Enhanced Model
This presentation contributes to the development of pedagogical materials to teach standard Spanish orthography to Mexican American university students who have native oral proficiency in Spanish but lack writing skills. From a database of orthographic errors, appropriate learning materials will be developed and implemented into a software program using the conversational agent Baldi. This software will allow the language learner to focus on challenges relevant to them and to solve these challenges within a self-paced, low-anxiety format.

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The Efficacy of Greek Language Education in America
The research reported in this session surveyed the condition and needs of Greek heritage language schools in the United States. The study also examined the impact of Greek heritage language education on the English language and academic achievement of students at the elementary and secondary levels. The results indicated a positive correlation between Greek language achievement and English and academic achievement.

From Theory to Handbook: Latino Identity in the Heritage Language Classroom
This poster session presents the Handbook for the Teaching of Spanish as a Heritage Language developed by graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. The handbook develops a framework for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language that addresses the sociopolitical, historical, and economic factors that inform the social and linguistic experiences of Latina/o students. The handbook combines a theoretical framework with concrete pedagogical approaches for instructors.

"The Gift of Spanish": Promoting Child First Language Literacy Through Service Learning
In the Learning for Teaching/Teaching for Learning (LT/TL) Program, college students enrolled in service learning-based linguistic courses become mentors who promote child first-language literacy in Spanish-speaking families. In LT/TL families, older children’s ESL skills have outstripped their native Spanish language skills. The mostly non-Spanish-speaking college mentors enroll these English-dominant, Spanish speakers as senior members of the Spanish language and literacy club. They in turn initiate their younger siblings as "junior apprentices" into the same club.

Heritage Language School Activism: German Language Schools Become Visible
It is time for the private language schools to step out from their shadows. In order to be accepted as partners and as vital contributors to multilingualism in this country, they need to prove their professionalism. The German language schools have heeded the call. With mechanisms to demonstrate the high quality of their educational programs, they are making themselves more visible in the German-speaking community and to its institutions and organizations.

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Korean Language Programs in New York City Public Schools
Bilingual education has played a significant role in maintaining the heritage languages of immigrant students in the New York City public schools since the late 1970s. Currently, six New York City high schools have Korean language programs that fulfill the state’s foreign language requirement. The bilingual program services currently mandated, however, do not extend to satisfy the linguistic needs of students who were born to immigrant parents and who have already reached the required minimum level of English proficiency. This unmet demand has become an issue in the Korean community. This presentation reports on the status of Korean native language programs in the NYC public schools; describes the challenges in expanding the programs to satisfy the linguistic needs of Korean American students; and shows how K—12 programs, higher education institutions, community-based organizations, and professional organizations can collaborate to reduce programmatic barriers in school and to secure funding sources for this population.

Language and Culture in a Jewish High School Curriculum
This poster presents a Jewish culture-based high school curriculum that emphasizes communicative competence and mastery of modern spoken Hebrew. The students, at intermediate or high levels of L2 proficiency, increase their understanding of the sociocultural context and folk culture of Israel, the largest Hebrew-speaking community, while benefiting from exposure to spoken language as it is used contextually in a range of authentic situations by that community. The curriculum is based on popular Israeli songs that reflect a diverse culture and a an ethnically heterogeneous society.

Linguistic Variability and Standards for University Courses
This poster presents examples of student work at the third-year level of university Spanish courses. These courses are required at the beginning of the Spanish language major. Written and oral genres are examined to illustrate the degree of mismatch between the oral language of many of the students in South Texas and Spanish speakers in monolingual Spanish countries. These differences are discussed in view of the variability across and within Spanish dialects in general. The question of how an awareness of this variability may be brought to university-level teaching is addressed.

A Multimedia Content Approach to Khmer Heritage Language Instruction
The traditional, phonics-based approach to literacy used in community-based Khmer heritage instruction needs to be updated. The multimedia materials presented in this poster session represent an attempt to create a curriculum for university-level Khmer heritage language instruction. The literacy component is interwoven with content-based instruction designed to teach students to not only read and write about content topics but also to understand and discuss them in semiformal and formal educated discourse.

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An Online, Self-Directed Course in the Sindhi Language
This presentation reports on the development of an online, self-directed course in Sindhi currently under development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). In the United States, Sindhi language instruction is available on an irregular basis at only two institutions of higher education (Harvard and UIUC). There are no published course materials for Sindhi distributed in North America and only a single Sindhi language textbook available in India, which is geared towards the training of primary and secondary school teachers.

A Project Approach for Young Heritage Learners of Japanese
This poster session presents an example of a use of a project approach to teach young heritage learners of Japanese at a Saturday school. The poster consists of a rationale for using this approach, an example of the projects included with an explanation of how to design instructional materials, and a discussion of the benefits and challenges of this approach in heritage language schools.

The Revitalization of Spanish at the University of New Mexico
This poster session exhibits information on the goals and objectives of the Spanish as a Heritage Language Program at the University of New Mexico, the placement exam process, and a working manual approach. Also included is a writing strategy for the completion of a volume of student poetry in the fourth semester.

Serving Our Community: Developing Heritage Language Curricula in the Community College
The poster session focuses on describing the present and future efforts to implement instruction and technology, and to create community-based initiatives in the Spanish for Heritage Speakers program at Northern Virginia Community College. The presenters describes the development of a Blackboard® site as a student and instructor resource and the process of creating a new Spanish for Heritage Speakers course sequence for the Virginia community college system.

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Spanish in New Mexico: From Colonialism to Globalism
The Spanish Heritage Language Program at Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) offers a 2-credit hour, nontransferable introductory course that serves as a recruitment and retention tool. A Heritage Language Resource manual for instructors that includes pedagogical articles, cultural information appropriate to this region, literature, students’ work, and other materials has been developed through a small grant. This year an introductory Yiddish course was added . In the future, credit for Native American languages taken at the pueblos or at SFCC will be offered.

A Study of the Expression of Hypotheticality in Spanish
This study analyzes the effects of formal instruction on the acquisition of the standard variety of Spanish by looking at the expression of conditionality (i.e., hypothetical discourse) produced by heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States who are attending university classes at the intermediate and advanced levels.

Teaching Culture in a Heritage Classroom
Culture is a central yet underexamined concept in second language teaching. In comparison to other fields such as anthropology and cultural studies, there has been little serious discussion and critique of the concept in this field. This poster session discusses three issues in the teaching of culture: how to define Korean culture, what kinds of culture should be taught at different levels, and the discrepancy between heritage and non-heritage learners in teaching culture.

Teaching Korean as a Heritage Language: Curriculum Design Using Authentic Materials
This poster presentation introduces the design of a new curriculum that is implemented in Korean language instruction for heritage Korean speakers at UCLA. The presentation describes syllabi, instructional procedures, sample lesson plans, and classroom and web-based activities that use authentic resources such as video clips of conversations among native speakers in authentic social settings, cartoons, and magazine advertisements and articles that reflect the popular culture of young adults in Korea.

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The Use of Portfolios in a Composition Class for Spanish Heritage Speakers (SHS)
This poster presentation focuses on how to use portfolios in a composition class for SHS as a means for developing, refining, and maintaining their Spanish writing skills. The main goal is to inform readers of the principles, rules, and possibilities that the portfolio offers in a writing class for this group. The results of using this methodology in a SHS Spanish writing class are also presented.

United States Spanish vs. Standard Spanish: A Contrastive Classroom Approach
This session presents a Spanish course for heritage Spanish speakers that exposes the students to the differences between the standard variety and the home variety of Spanish and that explores the implications of choosing one over the other. The goal of this course is two-fold: to single out the dialectal forms that stigmatize Spanish speakers and to allow students to explore different varieties of the language in order to make appropriate choices.

What Threatens Armenian in Armenian Day Schools in the United States?
Members of the Armenian day school community in the United States report that a majority of the schools’ student body-predominantly immigrant, and first generation Armenian American-prefer to communicate in English while at school. This project investigates whether student reluctance to speak and learn Armenian signifies the failure of the schools to teach the language effectively, or indicates student relinquishment of the ethnic language in favor of the language of power.

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