UCLA CENTER LAUNCHES NATIONAL EFFORT TO UNDERSTAND, EDUCATE ‘HERITAGE’ SPEAKERS
By Kevin Matthews

UCLA International Institute, CA
Nov 29 2006

With a new National Language Resource Center, the federal government is
recognizing that the preservation of U.S. language communities will not
be accomplished with approaches aimed at monolingual Americans. The new
center grew out of a proposal by the UCLA Center for World Languages
and a UC-wide consortium on language instruction.

Tagalog was part of Chris’s identity; Ryan could talk on the
telephone; Athena simply listened to others at home.The two dozen
students in this quarter’s Section 1 of Introductory Filipino/Tagalog
at UCLA all grew up in California, all have at least one parent of
Filipino descent, and all heard the language at home. It’s a typical
class for Philippine-born instructor Nenita Pambid Domingo. UCLA’s
Tagalog students are "99 percent" heritage learners, she says, and
members of the remaining 1 percent often enroll because of "romantic
entanglements" with Tagalog speakers.

A similar situation holds for many other languages that are less
commonly taught at colleges and universities-that is, they are also
heritage languages because their acquisition by students begins in
homes and communities, not the classroom. Meanwhile, the peculiar
(and varying) pedagogical needs of heritage learners must also be
addressed in popular language programs such as Spanish.

Although the issue has been around for decades, materials and
agreed-upon methods for heritage teaching are lacking to this day,
according to UCLA’s Olga Kagan, director of a new federally funded
center for heritage language education. In U.S. classrooms, only
Spanish has been taught to native speakers for more than a few years,
and even in that case, says Maria Carreira, a linguistics professor at
California State University, Long Beach, who is working closely with
Kagan, "the number and variety of texts for Spanish speakers pales in
comparison to those available for non-natives." Worse, she says, there
are no training manuals or programs for heritage language instructors.

One of 15 U.S. centers charged with setting standards for teaching
languages, the National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC)
seeks to fill these gaps. The NHLRC was launched this summer when
UCLA’s Center for World Languages (CWL, also directed by Kagan) and
the UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching won a four-year
Education Department grant, worth $326,000 per year, to oversee nine
major projects in the emergent field.

The ambitious near-term goals of the NHLRC include the creation of
1) a database tracking where certain U.S. immigrant and refugee
communities live, with analysis of their demographics and case
studies of how minority languages are passed on to new generations,
2) a generic framework for the design of heritage language curricula
that takes diversity both among and within groups into account,
and 3) a yearly research institute, or symposium of scholars, for
the study of heritage language knowledge and loss across languages,
to guide the development of course materials and teacher training.

To Paraphrase Tolstoy According to Kagan, the impetus to preserve
heritage languages comes variously from students, their nuclear
and extended families, and their communities. For example, many of
UCLA’s 2,000 Korean American undergraduates at some point develop an
interest in South Korean popular culture, while a Chinese American
student may decide to pursue business opportunities in his parents’
or grandparents’ home country. For Armenian immigrants, the memory of
the 1915-18 genocide and the desire to preserve traditional culture
drive collective efforts to preserve the language (the third most
spoken in metropolitan Los Angeles). Russian parents unfailingly
observe the inadequacy of translations of nineteenth-century novels
such as Anna Karenina, and may view the Russian language as key to
their children’s cultural awareness.

Families and communities can also impede language preservation. For
example, says Domingo, Filipino American students who formally
take up the language more confidently spoken by their parents and
grandparents may do so without encouragement from home. A generation
ago they faced active resistance from parents concerned about a legacy
of discrimination. (And that’s Tagalog-the dominant national language
of the Philippines along with American-imposed English. The islands’
important regional tongues, though spoken around L.A., are scarcely
taught at all.)

Foreign language learners are all alike. Every unhappy heritage
language learner is unhappy in her own way.

The truism will hold even within a single U.S. language community.

Domingo’s students may have a lot in common, but their abilities and
needs vary surprisingly. Chris Torralba, a third-year undergraduate,
says he spoke a lot of Tagalog before class began this fall. His
parents always "thought that the language should be a part of who I
am." Ryan Ruiz, also in his third year, is not so emphatic, but as
a child he could conduct phone conversations in the language.

Meanwhile, Elsie Velasco, another third-year, overheard her family
but did not speak. Fourth-year student Athena Peralta was born in
the Philippines and brought at age two to the United States, where
she has lost a great deal in spite of hearing Tagalog at home.

According to Domingo, any of these students can speak the language
fairly well after a year of coursework. Learning the grammar is often
a greater challenge; there detachment helps, and second language
learners have a slight advantage.

A heritage student may appear to be, and may be, fluent in a language
for many purposes but turn mute when conversation proceeds beyond a
repertory of everyday, home-centered contexts, Kagan says.

Traditional written and oral exams don’t capture such a person’s
strengths and weaknesses. That’s one more in the bevy of shortcomings
that she wants the new language resource center to address.