Teaching Heritage Speakers--VIRTUAL

Speaker: Dr. Kim Potowski (U. of Illinois at Chicago Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies)

Heritage speakers are increasingly common in Spanish classrooms around the U.S. and they differ in important ways from beginning second language students. What are some typical profiles of heritage speakers ("apples") and how are they linguistically and affectively different from second language students ("oranges")? How can we determine appropriate curricular goals, instructional approaches, and placement procedures? And what can instructors do when a separate heritage speaker course is not possible, resulting in a classroom with a mix of "apples" and "oranges"? The goal is to best serve the linguistic and affective needs of this large and growing population of wonderfully bilingual youth who are too often marginalized by mainstream curriculum and negative linguistic judgments. Co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Department of Linguistics and Department of Hispanic Languages & Literatures