Sorry I forgot to mention in the intro: we’re recording this session, so if you don’t want to be included in the recording, feel free to turn off your video.

I am!

Me.

A short overview here https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bilingualism-language-and-cognition/article/understanding-heritage-languages/01BB843E2D5CDCF7452BFDF47D4F25FD

Why compare heritage speakers to monolingual speakers rather than balanced bilinguals? I'm thinking of Klein's target deviation perspective, and wondering what is gained by comparing heritage language speakers to monolingual standards rather than to productions of balanced bilinguals?

@Katie We’re going to get to the interesting comparisons in the next question! :)

cool!

I bet she was pretty good at the syntax, too.

Is there any reason why you only talk about production, not about comprehension? HL speakers seem to be very special in this...

I only work on comprehension. :)

Oh, sorry, I was confused!

This story about heritage speakers being in L2 classrooms is interesting, and it’s relatively common in my social circles. Is there work on the impact of classroom instruction later in life for heritage speakers?

you were not—a lot of HL work is based on production, it is only recently that we have started working on their comprehension. I will be talking about that in my part

@Zach I know Kira has thought a lot about that; we’re planning to get to that in a bit!

On Zachary’s question: there was a whole recent issue of Frontiers on that topic. The bottom line is that you want these people in separate classrooms, not mixed with L2

my undergraduate program offered a heritage class in Mandarin, but I think even that would be very difficult to manage because of the heterogeneity among HL learners that's been mentioned

https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/10166/the-home-language-goes-to-school-heritage-languages-in-classroom-learning-environments#articles

Interesting, thanks!

close test in what language?

Are there any SURPRISES about what HL speakers DO learn, despite their attenuated experience? I wouldn’t be surprised if a heritage speaker of Russian doesn’t have the case morphology correct. But is there something they DO have right that is surprising. I remember being utterly baffled in grad school when I discovered that I had different judgments about Weak Crossover in German vs English — the correct ones for each language.

@Masha I think she was talking about a cloze test in the heritage language

What role does literacy play in HL and its maintenance?

@Min, great question. If it isn't addressed, please ask it again in the Q&A

@Alexander. This was the theme of Sunyoung Lee’s PhD dissertation in SLA a few years ago. She compared profiles across a number of domains. One surprise was that in the speech perception tasks that Sunyoung used, the HL Koreans were really quite poor, despite having generally excellent Korean pronunciation skills.

@Colin: on the other hand, Charles Chang shows that HL speakers of Korean are BETTER than monolinguals on phoneme discrimination task

Are there any studies on how community HL programs (after school, weekend, church) perhaps mitigate the attrition or “weaknesses” (I don’t like that word) of HLLs?

@John: there are small scattered studies here and there, and they suggest that “Sunday schools” (broadly construed) actually do very little. The best effects come from visits to the home country. There is interesting work by Helena Halmari on that in Heritage Finnish

For education studies, check out the Heritage Language Journal https://www.heritagelanguages.org/

@Masha. Is this the Chang study you had in mind? It looks like Robert DeKeyser (here with us today) was also involved in this one. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1_NoAiLQlnkR2FkZURwZVVqb3c/view

@Colin: that’s one of them, Charles has run a whole series. He has all of them on his website

https://cbchang.com/publications/in-press/

Thank you!

Thank you!