Abstract
This chapter describes the design and goals of a first-year undergraduate course that introduces students to research in heritage languages. The course illustrates a means of increasing pedagogical activity related to heritage languages at the university level. The benefits to students, faculty, and the community of engaging students in disciplinary practices in the field of sociolinguistics are noted. The integration of pedagogy and research is articulated around five goals: to train students in aspects of research including fieldwork and analysis, to develop information literacy, to provide opportunities for transactional writing, to connect research and teaching, and to encourage students, especially students who are speakers of minority languages, to get involved in research. While the course has been offered in the context of a large research-oriented university that encourages undergraduate involvement in research, resources are offered so that aspects of the course may be adapted to situations which share only some features of the context in which it was developed.
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Notes
- 1.
Acknowledgments: This research is supported by grants from SSHRC (410-2009-2330, 435-2016-1430), the Shevchenko Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Ukrainian Studies, and University of Toronto funds for developing pedagogical infrastructure. The chapter benefitted from discussion with Silva Dal Negro, George Nagy, Jill Nagy, and Andrea Williams. It would not have been possible without the dedicated work by students in Exploring Heritage Languages since 2009.
- 2.
The term “heritage language” is used differently in different domains. Here, in contrast to its use in many language acquisition studies, where the term is often used to indicate a language which was incompletely acquired or attrited by a speaker (cf. Polinsky and Kagan 2007), the Canadian definition of heritage language is applied: an individual with a cultural connection to a language other than English or French, born abroad or born within Canada and descended from speakers having learned the language in the homeland, and fluent enough to have a conversation in the language (Harrison 2000).
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Nagy, N. (2016). Heritage Language Speakers in the University Classroom, Doing Research. In: Trifonas, P., Aravossitas, T. (eds) Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38893-9_41-1
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