Heritage Language Development

The NFLC is dedicated to identifying and promoting the importance of heritage communities to the nation's language capacity. The NFLC is working to achieve this goal through supporting education policy that involves heritage communities, heritage community language programming, and teacher development focused on heritage learners.

Following this agenda, the NFLC launched the first national Heritage Language Initiative, including the first national conference on heritage language in the U.S. Below is more information on the Heritage Language Initiative and a summary of various Heritage Language Initiative activities.

Heritage Language Initiative (HLI)

The Heritage Language Initiative works to increase dialogue and promote collaboration among heritage language schools and communities, researchers, K-12 educators, and consumers of language resources.

The more than 150 different non-indigenous and First Peoples' languages used in the United States are both a cultural treasure and a natural language resource. Indeed these "heritage" languages constitute a valuable element as the U.S. increasingly is recognizing the importance of fluency in more than one language. Even in the face of this recognition, however, heritage languages have frequently been overlooked in second language acquisition educational programs.

The NFLC has taken the following series of steps to highlight the importance of heritage languages:

• Convened an informal meeting of interested university faculty and administrators (January, 1998)
• Joined with the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in launching a Heritage Languages Initiative (HLI) to help the U.S. education system recognize and develop heritage language resources as part of a larger effort to produce a broader cadre of citizens who can function professionally in English and other languages
• Issued a position paper authored by Richard D. Brecht and Catherine W. Ingold entitled, "Tapping a National Resource: Heritage Languages in the United States" (July, 1998)
• Convened a heritage language symposium, hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle (September, 1998)
• Sponsored a national conference on heritage languages in America with the assistance of California State University, Long Beach (October 1999)
• Established a listserv, heritage-list@Majordomo.umd.edu, with over 350 subscribers (February, 2000)
• Conducted an invitational research symposium at the University of California, Los Angeles (September, 2000)

The Heritage Languages Initiative has five objectives:

1. Initiate and support dialogue among policy makers and language practitioners about the need to address heritage language development, as well as effective strategies for achieving enhanced development of heritage languages
2. Promote the design and implementation of heritage language development programming at all levels – from early childhood through high school, in community colleges, and college and university settings – and foster better articulation among those settings
3. Provide support in terms of policy, expertise, and resources for community based language programs wherever they exist, and support their development where they do not
4. Encourage and support dialogue leading to collaboration, resource sharing, and articulation between formal education systems and the nation's heritage community language schools and programs
5. Encourage and support research, both theoretical and applied, on heritage language development and on related public policy issues

To achieve these objectives, the Heritage Languages Initiative plans to increase dialogue and promote collaboration among a broad range of stakeholders:

• Students, parents, and the broader community
• Educators and researchers
• Heritage language schools
• Elementary and secondary schools and institutions of higher education
• Consumers of language resources