What’s “heritage language education”?

In the context of the U.S., a heritage language course refers to a class for speakers with a familial, community, and cultural connection to a language other than English.  Of course, there are many times when teachers have heritage learners and new language learners without these meaningful ties to the language all learning together. These are called “mixed classes”. Teachers teaching “mixed classes” are also heritage language teachers. Your students determine what kind of class you are teaching - not the name of the class itself!

Heritage language courses and programs have increased in availability over the years - mostly due to the advocacy and demands by parents, teachers, and multilingual/heritage learners in schools. When schools earmark resources for heritage language classes, this can be seen as a progressive action by school administration. In reality, the fact that these courses exist in the U.S. is a direct result of the deprioritization of multilingualism (Valdés, 2005), and English-dominant (or only) school experiences that restrict home languages with the goal of creating an English-dominant child (Cushing-Leubner, 2019). Languages live through the people who use them. When subtractive and restrictive language policies and school experiences keep a child from growing their home language alongside English, their home language is made into their heritage language.

In other words - schools are doing the harm of creating heritage language learners of people’s own languages. And we believe that it’s our schools’ responsibility to repair that harm.

This is where teachers come in. Teachers are part of everyday heritage language reclamation. And heritage language reclamation is one of the keys to sustaining languages, cultural understandings, knowledge systems, and healthy futures.