This course is designed specifically for native or heritage speakers of Spanish who already have some oral language proficiency. The purpose of this course is to enable students to develop, maintain, and enhance their proficiency in the heritage language by providing them the opportunity to listen, speak, read, and write in a variety of contexts and for a variety of audiences, including the family, school, and the immediate community. The course will allow students to explore the cultures that use the heritage language, including their own, and it will enable students to gain a better understanding of the nature of their own language as well as other languages to be acquired.
Language Maintenance: The heritage language classes offer students who are already able to converse in and understand Spanish an opportunity to maintain, develop, and refine their language for academic and technical purposes. Additionally, students enrolled in this course will acquire and/or refine literacy skills in Spanish. To accomplish this, students must gain some experience in reading effortlessly from a variety of authentic sources and must have an opportunity to write often for a variety of purposes and audiences.
Transfer of Literacy Skills: When students develop their oral and literacy skills in their home language, they enhance their literacy development in English. The incorporation of reading skills and the writing process helps students as they approach a reading or writing assignment in both languages. The heritage language teacher can introduce strategies to help students make sense of the text or to help them organize their ideas prior to a presentation. Those strategies can be transferred to the English class where students are expected to engage in similar activities.
Register: Register, or knowing when and how to use formal versus informal language, is important in both the heritage language and English. One of the purposes of heritage language programs is to develop literacy skills, which incorporate registers as part of the Presentational Communication mode in speaking and writing for different audiences. Facility with register helps students progress into advanced levels of proficiency and perform effectively with the wide variety of materials and tasks found in upper-level language courses.
Cultural Awareness: Students in heritage language programs may have a limited view of the culture(s) associated with their language. Teachers can help students by introducing them to the wide variety of cultures all over the Spanish-speaking world, but especially those represented in the classroom. This allows students to make connections by comparing and contrasting the different cultures and languages with their own. This approach builds students’ self-esteem and honors their need to simultaneously identify and communicate with:
● their heritage, home, or immersion culture(s) and;
● the mainstream culture(s) in which they live and work.
Language Variety: Teachers need to accept and validate the diversity in the students' languages and be very careful to avoid denigrating the language spoken by the students or to impose their own language variety as the "correct" one. Language diversity can be an effective teaching tool to help students expand their language. In addition, heritage languages have many dialects which exist within different regions of a country, and this diversity can be a powerful tool for bilingual students in a global economy.
Error Correction: Heritage speakers are sensitive to being corrected. A focus on errors alienates the students and reinforces the notion that their language is not good enough. For this reason, it is best to first validate what the students already know and then help them build on that to expand their linguistic repertoire.
Learning Strategies: Research shows that good learners adopt a variety of strategies. These include monitoring their own and others' performances, using mnemonic techniques, organizing information, incorporating graphic organizers, applying reading and writing processes, and much more. Students can be taught to use these strategies to become better language learners and to take more responsibility for their own learning.
Content from Other Subjects: Students should be given the opportunity to apply their language to challenging and engaging topics which involve them in reading, writing, discussing, and supporting opinions.
Critical Thinking Skills: Throughout their language learning experience, students encounter a variety of thinking skills ranging from basic (memorization and recall) to more complex (summarizing, problem solving, organizing, inferring, analyzing, and synthesizing). An effective world language classroom can be designed to promote the development of critical thinking skills by involving students in activities requiring increasingly complex thinking skills. It is important to remember that the level of thinking skills is not tied to the amount of language the students know but rather to their cognitive development.
Pacing