Editors' Foreword

Olga Kagan, UCLA; Kathleen Dillon, UC Consortium for Language Learning and Teaching

We are very pleased to publish this guest-edited issue of the Heritage Language Journal, dedicated to issues common to Teaching English as a Second Language and heritage languages.

We are grateful to Linda Jensen, UCLA, and Debra Suarez, College of Notre Dame of Maryland, who proposed the theme and co-edited the issue.

Preliminary results of a 2007 survey conducted by the National Heritage Language Resource Center of students who study their heritage language reveal that 63% of the 1,200 respondents were born in the United States. Nonetheless, English is the second language they acquired. The correspondence between acquiring English as a second language and heritage languages acquisition is discussed in this issue’s articles.

Two other language-specific issues for HLJ are in preparation: the Russian issue (ed. David Andrews, Georgetown University) and the Korean issue (ed. Jin Sook Lee, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Sarah Shin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County). We have begun discussions on a special issue on Spanish and one on learners’ identities. Calls for papers will be widely disseminated. At the same time, we continue to seek contributions to our next general issue.

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