Presenter: Maria Carrie, California State University, Long Beach
Title: Seeking Informed and Actionable Best Practices in Heritage Language Teaching: How to bridge the gap between theory and practice

Time: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM, Thursday, September 9

Zoom link: https://virginia.zoom.us/j/95883849039(link is external) Password: IWL

Abstract: In recent years, important advances in heritage language (HL) education have been accompanied by remarkable developments in the area of heritage linguistics, that is, the study of heritage grammars. Yet, as Polinsky (2016) notes, the two fields remain largely disconnected from each other.  Why is this? And what can be done about it? As I argue in Carreira (forthcoming), one reason for this disconnect is that the two fields have divergent views of the notion of proficiency. A second reason is that research in heritage linguistics is not grounded in the realities of language teaching, which makes it difficult to operationalize its findings in the real world. Despite these seemingly irreconcilable differences, heritage linguistics has important contributions to make to HL teaching and learning. In this presentation I will identify four categories of contributions that stand to enrich teaching and curriculum design. A common thread to the analysis of each category is that operationalizing the findings of heritage linguistics for teaching purposes is not a straightforward task, but rather requires the integration of different areas of expertise as well as consideration of practical realities.

Maria M. Carreira is an Emerita Professor of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach, and the co-founder and Emerita Co-director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. Her research focuses on Spanish in the United States and heritage language teaching and learning. She is a coauthor of six Spanish language textbooks and of Voces: Latino Students on Life in the United States (Praeger, 2014). She is also coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education: From Innovation to Program Building (Routledge, 2017). She also serves as a Board Member of ACTFL and Associate Editor of Hispania.