This article explores possibilities for extending aboriginal language education opportunities into the urban domain based on qualitative research in Vancouver, British Columbia. The author argues that aboriginal language revitalization efforts have a place in the city, as demonstrated by emerging language ideologies of urban aboriginal people…

This special issue of the "Heritage Language Journal", guest edited by Silvina Montrul, unites four papers on different aspects of heritage Spanish speakers' linguistic abilities. In this commentary, we reexamine these important contributions with an eye toward implications for instruction and toward general trends for the field. In particular, we…

This article focuses on the 3 San communities in South Africa: the !Xun, the Khwe, and the [image omitted]Khomani San. The !Xun and Khwe communities are living in Platfontein, near Kimberley in the Northern Cape. The [image omitted]Khomani San community is living in Upington and in the southern Kalahari, which are also in the Northern Cape. This…

Taiwan began its political reform of languages in the 1990s. At this time, "Mandarin Plus" (Official Language Plus) became the core of Taiwanese language policy to deal with the aftermath of forced national linguistic assimilation under Chiang's administration (1945-1988). Mandarin Plus, defined as teaching vernacular languages other…

The present paper examines the oral performance of Hindi language learners during practice Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI) conducted during workshops hosted by New York University and sponsored by STARTALK. The most salient characteristics of the heritage language learners' output are compared with the output of foreign language learners who are…

This research describes the predicted outcomes of a Kenyan Cloud School (KCS), which is a MOOC that contains all courses taught at the secondary school level in Kenya. This MOOC will consist of online, ongoing subjects in both English and Kiswahili. The KCS subjects offer self-testing and peer assessment to maximize scalability, and digital badges…

This article reviews part of the progress of the first year of the Isan Culture Maintenance and Revitalisation Programme (ICMRP), a four-year 540,000 euro series of pilot studies co-funded by the European Union and based in Thailand. The ICMRP is based in four semi-autonomous municipalities in Khon Kaen Province, viz. Ban Phai, Chum Phae, Khon…

Despite the proliferation of research in heritage language (HL) education, pedagogically based research that examines teacher education practice for promoting critical reflection of HL teachers is sparse. This article describes how preservice teachers working in community-based HL schools changed their views of HL identity during their…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise, description and basic statistics about minority language education in a specific region of Europe. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements, and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects, such as the…

An extensive body of research documents the successes of immigrant groups in establishing community language schools. Studied within this tradition, Latino immigrant communities appear to come up short, because of the scarcity of such schools for Spanish-speaking children. However, as we show in this paper, Latino immigrant communities do have…

This study examined the linguistic competence in Korean of Korean heritage language learners (HLLs), compared to English-speaking non-heritage language learners (NHLLs) of Korean. It is unclear and controversial as to whether heritage languages learners are exposed to early but are interrupted manifest as L1 competence or share more…

This dissertation examines the participation of one Chinese teacher and five 13 to 15 year-old Chinese heritage students in a classroom in a Chinese community school during group discussions about narrative texts. In this study, the teacher used Collaborative Reasoning (CR) (Anderson, et al., 2001) to help the Chinese heritage students extend…

This paper, based on the results of a small pilot study of a Bengali supplementary school, discusses the features of the school in relation to other studies of supplementary "mother-tongue" schools and goes on to explore the pedagogy of the school, its relationship with other sites and spaces of learning and the implications of these for…

This study examines what a Korean heritage language school means to Korean immigrant families and their children, considering Korean immigrant mothers' perspectives on American early schooling. As part of an ethnographic research project on Korean-American children's peer culture in a heritage school, seven mothers, two guardians (grandmothers),…

Although the definition of heritage language learner (HLLs) has been widely explored, researchers tend to base their definitions on learner proficiency. While such a premise is a safe and conservative way to identify heritage students, it pays little mind to inclusivity. Indeed, it may place the university in the role of cultural gatekeeper,…