Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

Handbook of Research and Practice in Heritage Language Education pp 1–21Cite as

Heritage Language Speakers in the University Classroom, Doing Research

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:

  • 215 Accesses

Part of the book series: Springer International Handbooks of Education ((SIHE))

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Notes

  1. 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. 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).

References

  • Bialystok, E., Craik, F., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the Simon Task. Psychology and Aging, 19(2), 290–303.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cheng, W., Warren, M., & Xun-Feng, X. (2003). The language learner as language researcher: Putting corpus linguistics on the timetable. System, 31(2), 173–186.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cummins, J., Bismilla, V., Chow, P., Cohen, S., Giampapa, F., Leoni, L., Sandhu, P., & Sastri, P. (2005). Affirming identity in multilingual classrooms. Educational Leadership, 63(1), 38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Discovery Program Advisory Committee and Center for Teaching Excellence, University of New Hampshire. (2006). Designing and teaching an inquiry 444 seminar: Approaches and strategies [Internet]. [Updated 2010 November 12; cited 2016 June 26]. Available from http://www.slideserve.com/Leo/designing-and-teaching-an-inquiry-444-seminar

  • Elmesky, R., & Tobin, K. (2005). Expanding our understandings of urban science education by expanding the roles of students as researchers. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 42(7), 807–828.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Genesee, F. (1994). Educating second language children: The whole child, the whole curriculum, the whole community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Giles, H., Bourhis, R., & Taylor, D. (1977). Towards a theory of language in ethnic group relations. In H. Giles (Ed.), Language, ethnicity and intergroup relations (pp. 307–348). New York: Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goodrich, R. (2012). Life or death: What a language needs to survive [Internet]. [Posted 2012 Nov 8; cited 24 Feb 2016. Available at http://vocabulary-software-review.toptenreviews.com/life-or-death-what-a-language-needs-to-survive.html

  • Grafstein, A. (2002). A discipline-based approach to information literacy. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 28(4), 197–204.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Harrison, B. (2000). Passing on the language: Heritage language diversity in Canada. Canadian Social Trends, 58, 14 (Catalogue No. 11-008-XPE, 58) Ottawa: Statistics Canada.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huber, M., & Morreale, S. (Eds.). (2002). Disciplinary styles in the scholarship of teaching and learning: Exploring common ground. Washington, DC: American Association for Higher Education and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

    Google Scholar 

  • Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Labov, W. (2001). Applying our knowledge of African American English to the problem of raising reading levels in inner-city schools. In S. Lanehart (Ed.), African American English: State of the art (pp. 299–318). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

    Google Scholar 

  • Labov, W., & Baker, B. (2010). What is a reading error? Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 735–757.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lenski, S. (2004). Improving writing: Strategies, assessments, resources. Dubuque: Kendall Hunt.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nagy, N. (2011). A multilingual corpus to explore geographic variation. Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, 43(1–2), 65–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nagy, N. (2015). A sociolinguistic view of null subjects and VOT in Toronto heritage languages. Lingua, 164B, 309–327.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nagy, N. (2016). Heritage languages as new dialects. In M. Côté, R. Knooihuizen, & J. Nerbonne (Eds.), The future of dialects: Selected papers from methods in dialectology (Vol. XV, pp. 15–34). Berlin: Language Science. doi:10.17169/langsci.b81.81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nagy, N., & Meyerhoff, M. (2008). The social lives of linguistics. In M. Meyerhoff & N. Nagy (Eds.), Social lives in language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities (pp. 1–17). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Oberst, J. (2011). Heidegger on language and death: The intrinsic connection in human existence. A&C Black.

    Google Scholar 

  • Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1(5), 368–395.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ragland, R. (2008). Using scholarly research in course redesign: Teaching to engage students with authentic disciplinary practices. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning [Internet], 2(2). Art. 4. [Updated 2013 Oct 21; cited 2016 Jun 26]. Available from http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/ij-sotl/vol2/iss2/4

  • Statistics Canada. (2011). Census of population as a home language or mother tongue [Internet]. [Updated 2013 Feb 13; cited 2016 June 27]. Available from http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/demo12c-eng.htm

  • Statistics Canada. (2011). 2011 Census Highlights: Factsheet 6. [Updated 2013 July 23; cited 2016 June 27] Available from: http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/economy/demographics/census/cenhi11-6.html

  • Walker, J. (2010). Variation in linguistic systems. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A., & Sloetjes, H. (2006). ELAN: A professional framework for multimodality research. In Proceedings of LREC 2006, Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolfram, W., Reaser, J., & Vaughn, C. (2008). Operationalizing linguistic gratuity: From principle to practice. Language and Linguistics Compass [Internet], 2(6), 1109–1134. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00092.x [cited 2016 Jun 27].

    Google Scholar 

  • Xiao, Y. (2006). Heritage learners in the Chinese language classroom: Home background. Heritage Language Journal, 4(1). [Cited 2016 Jun 27]. Available from http://international.ucla.edu

  • Yang, J. (2016). Multiculturalism and the status of Heritage Languages in USA and Canada. Paper presented at The Future of Community Languages in Canada: The Case of Modern Greek, The Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics Department, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Naomi Nagy

Authors
  1. Naomi Nagy
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Naomi Nagy .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. OISE/University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Peter Pericles Trifonas

  2. CERES/University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Themistoklis Aravossitas

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

About this entry

Cite this entry

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

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38893-9_41-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-38893-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-38893-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation