How Should Heritage Languages Be Taught?: The Effects of a Free Voluntary Reading Program

Abstract

The United States has experienced a sharp rise in recent years in the number of heritage language (HL) bilinguals, students who speak a language other than English at home. Due to a lack of advanced language development in other settings, many of these students enroll in foreign language courses in their respective home languages. This paper reports on a program designed to promote heritage language and literacy development in one university‐level HL course, Spanish for Native Speakers (SNS). The ten‐week program involved two classes of mostly English‐dominant SNS students participating in an experimental course that included a combination of the following elements: free voluntary reading (FVR) outside the classroom, in‐class literature circles (small group book discussions), a survey of popular literature in Spanish, and individual inquiry learning projects. Three measures of the course were used to evaluate its success in terms of vocabulary acquisition, attitudes toward Spanish literacy development, and reading habits. The experimental group made significant gains in word knowledge, read more than a comparison group of SNS students, and exhibited positive attitudes toward Spanish literacy at the end of the ten‐week course. The evidence in favor of FVR, theoretical justifications for the approach in SNS courses, and implications for redesigning heritage language curricula at the secondary and university levels are discussed.

Student Perceptions of Foreign Language Study: A Qualitative Analysis of Foreign Language Autobiographies

“…Students found it discouraging to be placed in the same courses with native or heritage language speakers who had outside contact in the language (Cho, Cho, & Tse, 1997;Krashen, Tse, & McQuillan, 1998;Tse, 1999), or with those who were retaking lower division courses. Although many universities have attempted to establish separate courses for heritage language speakers (e.g., Spanish for Native Speaker courses; Collison, 1994;McQuillan, 1996) and to adjust their placement procedures, such efforts have not always succeeded in creating classes with students at roughly equivalent proficiency levels.…”

Content‐Based Instruction: Can it Help Ease the Transition from Beginning to Advanced Foreign Language Classes?

“…Results from TB programs are similar in nature to those just presented for SLM. Several studies report that students in experimental classes made significant pre-and post-gains on a variety of language measures (Corin 1997;Klahn 1997;Klee and Tedick 1997;McQuillan 1996;McQuillan and Rodrigo;Milk 1990;Peck 1987;Rodrigo 1997;Stryker 1997; see Table 2 for results) and scored comparably or significantly higher than students enrolled in skill-based courses at the same level, even though there was no explicit grammar or other language instruction (Chadran and Esarey 1997;Dupuy 1996;Hudson 1991;Kasper 1997;Lafayette and Buscaglia 1985;Leaver 1997;Schleppegrell 1984;Sternfeld 1992Sternfeld , 1993; see Table 2 for results).…”

Differences in Language Skills: Heritage Language Learner Subgroups and Foreign Language Learners

“…In practice, many U.S. educational institutions, especially at the postsecondary level, have provided separate programs for HL and FL learners as a pedagogically sound strategy. For example, in North America, separate tracks for the HL versus FL groups are available in a variety of immigrant languages, such as Chinese (McGinnis, 1996), Japanese (Kondo, 1998), Korean (Sohn, 1995(Sohn, , 1997, South Asian languages (Gambhir, 2001;Moag, 1995), Spanish (McQuillan, 1996;Webb & Miller, 2000), and Russian (Kagan & Dillon, 2003;Kagan & Rifkin, 2000). One strong rationale for this strategy is that the language learning behaviors and needs of HL learners are distinctly different from those of traditional FL students (Andrews, 2000;Campbell, 1996;Campbell & Rosenthal, 2000;King, 1998;Mazzocco, 1996;Pino & Pino, 2000).…”