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Heritage Languages

Over 55 million people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home (U.S. Census Bureau). Individuals exposed to a language spoken at home but educated primarily in English are heritage speakers of the home language.

The Center's mission is to develop effective pedagogical approaches to teaching heritage language learners, first by creating a research base and then by pursuing curriculum design, materials development, and teacher education.

  NHLRC in Action

  Resources

The National Heritage Language Resource Center offers resources for use in instruction, teacher education, and program development.

Teacher Education

• Teaching Guidelines: Instructional and Curricular
• Bibliography
• Materials from NHLRC/STARTALK teacher training workshop, 2009
• NHLRC/STARTALK 2009 Heritage Teacher Workshop Curriculum Sample
• Demographics

Curricular Materials

• Curriculum templates for high school heritage language classes (summer 2009, funded by STARTALK)
• Persian for Persian Speakers
• Hindi for Hindi-Urdu Speakers


• Abuelos Materials for Teaching Spanish
  created by María Carreira (CSULB)

Research

• Materials from Heritage Language Research Institutes
  by year: (2007) (2008) (2009)

What Is a Heritage Language, Olga Kagan?

The director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA (and of CWL) answers some frequently asked questions.

 Events

View past events and their associated resources.

Heritage Language Journal

A peer-reviewed journal that publishes research papers on issues relevant to heritage language education. Visit www.heritagelanguages.org

Heritage Language Learner Surveys

Help us contribute to knowledge on heritage speakers. We are currently conducting two surveys:

• Survey of college instructors who teach heritage learners
• Survey of college-level heritage language learners. We ask instructors to administer this survey to their heritage speaker students; for information and a password, please contact nhlrc@international.ucla.edu. If you have a password, please click on the link above.

Report on Survey of College-level Heritage Learners (2009)

Polinsky Language Lab

Harvard U. lab, directed by linguist Maria Polinsky, researches heritage speakers and language processing. Site includes current project descriptions, conference posters and presentations, information on data processing, and a wiki of ongoing activities.