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Bilingualism, Heritage Language Learners, and SLA Research: Opportunities Lost or Seized?

September 2005
Modern Language Journal 89(3):410 - 426

DOI:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2005.00314.x

Authors:

StanfordvUniversity

In this article I invite a reconceptualization and expansion of the field of second language acquisition (SLA) by examining possible intersections between SLA and the area of language instruction currently referred to as the teaching of heritage languages. I discuss the ways in which the opportunity of broadening SLA-and-instruction research can be seized by current researchers so that it can address the most intractable educational problems involving language. Drawing from current research on bilingualism, I first describe the challenges of providing language instruction for heritage speakers and examine the bilingualism of these unique language learners. I then offer an overview of the questions raised by the study of heritage language learners. Finally, I describe communities of professional practice and existing disciplinary boundaries and conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the field of SLA can draw from other areas in order to affect the educational futures of language minority children around the world and, at the same time, contribute to our greater understanding of the human language faculty.

A Continuum of L1/L2 Users

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The Study of Bilingualism

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Bilingualism, Heritage Language

Learners, and SLA Research:

Opportunities Lost or Seized?

GUADALUPE VALD´

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Stanford University

Pigott Hall, Building 260

Stanford, CA 94305-2014

Email: gvaldes@stanford.edu

In this article I invite a reconceptualization and expansion of the ﬁeld of second language

acquisition (SLA) by examining possible intersections between SLA and the area of language

instruction currently referred to as the teaching of heritage languages. I discuss the ways

in which the opportunity of broadening SLA-and-instruction research can be seized by cur-

rent researchers so that it can address the most intractable educational problems involving

language. Drawing from current research on bilingualism, I ﬁrst describe the challenges of

providing language instruction for heritage speakers and examine the bilingualism of these

unique language learners. I then offer an overview of the questions raised by the study of her-

itage language learners. Finally, I describe communities of professional practice and existing

disciplinary boundaries and conclude with a discussion of the ways in which the ﬁeld of SLA

can draw from other areas in order to affect the educational futures of language minority

children around the world and, at the same time, contribute to our greater understanding of

the human language faculty.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO

invite a reconceptualization and expansion of

the ﬁeld of second language acquisition (SLA)

by examining possible intersections between SLA

and the area of language instruction currently re-

ferred to as the teaching of heritage languages.

In proposing a reconceptualization of SLA, I am

well aware of the existing disagreement within this

ﬁeld about the relationship between SLA and lan-

guage pedagogy. Some researchers (e.g., Crookes,

1997; Spolsky, 1990) consider that a relationship

between these two areas is fundamental, while oth-

ers (e.g., Sharwood Smith, 1994) view SLA as en-

gaged in basic rather than applied research and

in contributing, not to the teaching of language,

but to the understanding of the workings of the

human mind while following the methodological

standards of quantitative-experimental scientiﬁc

The Modern Language Journal, 89, iii, (2005)

0026-7902/05/410–426 $1.50/0

2005 The Modern Language Journal

inquiry. My own position concurs with the for-

mer. I agree with Ortega’s injunctions (this issue)

about the role and purpose of research: (a) that

research should be inspired by considerations of

societal needs, and (b) that in carrying out re-

search we should embrace with genuine concern

questions of “for whom” and “for what.”

In proposing a reconceptualization of SLA, I

argue that an intersection between the area of

heritage language teaching and SLA responds

to Cook’s (2002) proposal to researchers to al-

ter the perspective of SLA by including second

language (L2) users. I also suggest that a mean-

ingful connection between these two areas would

begin to address recent criticisms about the nar-

rowness of SLA (Block, 2003; Firth & Wagner,

1997; Johnson, 2004) by focusing on the com-

plexities of heritage language speakers within

whose lives commonplace concepts such as mother

tongue,ﬁrst language, second language, dominant

language, and home language become problematic.

I maintain that the term Second Language Acqui-

sition, as Block (2003) has argued, has “built-in

Guadalupe Vald´

es 411

assumptions about monolingualism and separa-

ble L1 [ﬁrst language] and L2 competences”

(p. 44). These assumptions have not allowed the

ﬁeld to engage in the examination of instructed

language acquisition beyond L2 learners or to

address the most challenging issues and prob-

lems that arise in various educational contexts

for the most vulnerable minority language speak-

ers around the world. A reconceptualized ﬁeld of

SLA, as I envision it in this article, would exam-

ine language learning in various language edu-

cation contexts and view the language education

ﬁeld as going beyond beginning, intermediate,

and advanced L2 instruction and as involving sev-

eral types of language acquisition/development

as well, such as acquisition of second dialects,

acquisition of a standard language, acquisition

or development of specialized language registers

and styles, and acquisition of written language. I

strongly believe that this reconceptualization has

the potential to allow the ﬁeld of SLA to address

today’s most intractable educational problems in-

volving language.

The article is organized as follows. I ﬁrst de-

scribe the challenges of providing language in-

struction for heritage speakers and examine the

bilingualism of these unique language learners. In

doing so, I draw on a bilingualist perspective of L2

and heritage language acquisition that emerges

from the study of bilingualism and has been advo-

cated by some in SLA (notably, Cook, 1992, 2002).

I argue, however, that the term L1/L2 user is a bet-

ter choice than L2 user as a synonym for the her-

itage language learner. I then offer an overview of

the questions raised for the ﬁeld of SLA by this par-

ticular educational endeavor. Finally, I describe

communities of professional practice and exist-

ing disciplinary boundaries and conclude with a

discussion of the ways in which the opportunity

of broadening the ﬁeld of SLA can be seized by

current researchers so that it can directly affect

the educational futures of language minority chil-

dren around the world and, at the same time,

contribute to our greater understanding of the

human language faculty.

HERITAGE LANGUAGE SPEAKERS:

PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION

In recent years, the term heritage language has

been used broadly to refer to nonsocietal and

nonmajority languages spoken by groups often

known as linguistic minorities. Those members

of linguistic minorities who are concerned about

the study, maintenance, and revitalization of their

minority languages have been referred to as her-

itage language students. Such minorities include

populations who are either indigenous to a par-

ticular region of a present-day nation-state (e.g.,

Aborigines in Australia, speakers of Breton in

France, Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq) or pop-

ulations that have migrated to areas other than

their own regions or nations of origin (e.g., Mex-

icans in the United States, Turks in Germany,

Moroccans in Spain, Pakistanis in England). Mi-

nority languages or heritage languages include

indigenous languages that are often endangered

and in danger of disappearing (Scots Gaelic,

Maori, Romani) as well as world languages that

are commonly spoken in many other regions

of the world (Spanish in the United States,

Arabic in France).1Because these speakers may

acquire and use two or more languages in order to

meet their everyday communicative needs in such

settings, they have been referred to as circumstan-

tial bilinguals/multilinguals (Vald´

es & Figueroa,

1994) and contrasted with elite or elective bilin-

guals/multilinguals who learn a L2 in classroom

settings and have few opportunities to use the

language for genuine communication. Circum-

stantial bilingualism/multilingualism is generally

characteristic of populations who occupy subal-

tern positions in particular settings, whether they

are indigenous minorities in established nation

states (e.g., Bretons, Samis, Kurds) or other bor-

der crossers such as migrants, refugees, nomads,

and exiles.

As the work carried out by Fishman (1964,

1985) has made evident, minority language com-

munities in the United States have been deeply

committed to maintaining their community lan-

guages. In spite of strong assimilative pressures,

these communities have nevertheless established

language programs (e.g., Saturday schools) where

children are expected to develop existing her-

itage language proﬁciencies. Within the last few

years, moreover, individuals concerned about

the erosion and disappearance of minority lan-

guages have turned to educational institutions

in the hope that formal classroom instruction,

by revitalizing and developing the home lan-

guages of young speakers of indigenous and

immigrant languages, will be able to retard lan-

guage shift. Fishman (2001) has argued that for

these individuals and communities it is the his-

torical and personal connection to the heritage

language that is salient and not the actual proﬁ-

ciency of individual students. Armenian, for ex-

ample, would be considered a heritage language

for American students of Armenian ancestry even

if such students were themselves English-speaking

monolinguals. In terms of strengthening and

412 The Modern Language Journal 89 (2005)

preserving Armenian in this country, such her-

itage students would be seen as having an impor-

tant personal connection with the language and

an investment in maintaining the language for fu-

ture generations. Their motivation for studying

Armenian would thus contrast signiﬁcantly with

that of typical students of foreign language.

I have argued elsewhere (Vald´

es, 2000a, 2000b,

2001) that the foreign language teaching profes-

sion currently uses the term heritage student in a re-

stricted sense that is distinct from the broad sense

of the term outlined above. In the foreign lan-

guage teaching profession, the term designates

a student of language who is raised in a home

where a non-English language is spoken. The stu-

dent may speak or merely understand the her-

itage language and be, to some degree, bilingual

in English and the heritage language. This deﬁni-

tion is distinct from the scenario described above

where individuals work with endangered indige-

nous or immigrant languages that are not regu-

larly taught in school (e.g., as in the case of Ar-

menian). This difference has to do with actually

developed functional proﬁciencies in the heritage

languages. Moreover, for foreign language teach-

ing professionals, the term refers to a group of

young people who are different in important ways

from English-speaking monolingual students who

have traditionally undertaken the study of foreign

languages in U.S. schools and colleges. This need

to distinguish between the two groups of students

arose in the Spanish-teaching profession during

the 1970s. At that time, the terms native speak-

ers of Spanish,quasi native speakers of Spanish,and

bilingual students were common. A dissatisfaction

with these labels led to increased use of other

terms such as home background speakers (as used in

Australia) and heritage language speakers (as used

in Canada). Members of the profession in the

United States are currently engaged in examin-

ing the use of the term heritage language student

as they research the various types of students who

have a family background in which a non-English

language is, or was, spoken.

LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION AND HERITAGE

SPEAKERS IN THE UNITED STATES

The use of the term heritage student in the

restricted sense adopted within the foreign lan-

guage teaching profession is relatively new, and

its use was not generalized until the publication

of the Standards for Foreign Language Learning

(ACTFL, 1996). Up to that time, Spanish instruc-

tors were the only members of the foreign lan-

guage teaching profession who had worked with

large numbers of students who already under-

stood and spoke the language that they taught.

They had been doing so since the early 1970s, in

response to increasingly large numbers of Span-

ish heritage students who turned to already ex-

isting foreign language programs in language de-

partments at the postsecondary level in the hope

of developing their home languages. The large

number of Spanish speakers entering the coun-

try undoubtedly was part of the trend that signif-

icantly affected the Spanish-teaching profession.

College- and university-level faculty who had expe-

rience in teaching Spanish as a foreign language

opened their doors to students who, in some cases,

were more ﬂuent in the language than they were,

but who could not talk about the language us-

ing the terminology used in the teaching of tradi-

tional grammar. Individuals involved in teaching

Spanish to such students in the classroom setting

quickly discovered that these young people had a

very difﬁcult time learning grammar rules taught

to foreign language students. Not only did they

become confused by explanations of aspects of

the language that they already knew (e.g., the

difference between ser and estar), but they also

refused to conﬁne themselves to the limited vo-

cabulary of the textbook. Because many Latino

students who entered college had been schooled

exclusively in English, they had no experience

in reading and writing in Spanish. Worst of all—

from the perspective of some faculty—they were

often speakers of stigmatized varieties of Spanish

(e.g., rural Mexican Spanish, rural Puerto Rican

Spanish). There were no textbooks on the market

that could adequately deal with the “problem,”

and there was little agreement among Spanish-

teaching professionals (most of whom had been

trained in literature) about what to do and how to

do it. The consensus, reﬂected in the textbooks

of that period (e.g., Baker, 1966; Barker, 1972),

was that bilingual hispanophone students were in

need of remediation, of techniques and pedago-

gies that would help undo the damage that had

been done at home.2The terms used during those

years by the Spanish-teaching profession to refer

to these students—native speakers of Spanish,quasi

native speakers of Spanish,orbilingual students—

reﬂected this deﬁcit orientation. As mentioned

earlier, with time, other more positive terms such

as home background speakers and heritage language

speakers gained currency.

Since the early 1970s, the teaching of com-

monly and uncommonly taught foreign lan-

guages has greatly expanded. Interest in heritage

students and improvements in educational ap-

proaches and resources began in the late 1990s

Guadalupe Vald´

es 413

and continue today. Increased attention to the

role of formal instruction in maintaining heritage

languages has come about as a consequence of

the events of September 11th, which brought to

the nation’s attention the strategic importance

of “foreign” languages. As a result, the intelli-

gence and military communities (Muller, 2002)

have expressed a growing interest in expanding

the nation’s linguistic resources by both teach-

ing non-English languages and by maintaining

the heritage or home languages of the 47 mil-

lion individuals who reported speaking both En-

glish and a non-English language in the latest

census in 2000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). For

many individuals concerned about language re-

sources, the development of strategic languages

can only be brought about by expanding the mis-

sion of foreign language departments to include

the maintenance and expansion of the varieties

of non-English languages currently spoken by im-

migrants, refugees, and their children.

Professional activities focusing on the teach-

ing of heritage languages have increased enor-

mously. The American Association of Teachers

of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) initiated

its Professional Development Series Handbooks for

Teachers K–16 with Volume 1: Spanish for Na-

tive Speakers (AATSP, 2000). The National For-

eign Language Center (NFLC) in cooperation

with the AATSP developed a language-based re-

source, Recursos para la Ense˜

nanza y el Apren-

dizaje de las Culturas Hispanas, known as REACH

(http://www.nﬂc.org/REACH/), for teachers of

Spanish to heritage speakers. The NFLC also

developed LangNet, a searchable database that

includes Spanish and contains numerous re-

sources for the teaching of heritage languages.

In collaboration with the AATSP, the NFLC

also conducted a survey of Spanish language

programs for native speakers (Ingold, Rivers,

Tesser, & Ashby, 2002). The Center for Ap-

plied Linguistics and the NFLC launched the

Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Lan-

guages (http://www.cal.org/heritage/). The Al-

liance sponsored two national conferences, in

1999 and 2002, on the teaching of heritage lan-

guages in which many members of the Spanish-

teaching profession participated. The ﬁrst con-

ference led to the publication of the volume Her-

itage Languages in America (Peyton, Ranard, &

McGinnis, 2001), in which much attention was

given to the teaching of uncommonly taught lan-

guages, and also to the publication of a special

issue of the Bilingual Research Journal focusing on

heritage languages (Wiley & Vald´

es, 2000). The

second conference led to the publication of a re-

port on research priorities on the teaching of her-

itage languages entitled Directions in Research: In-

tergenerational Transmission of Heritage Languages

(Campbell & Christian, 2003).

THE BILINGUALISM OF AMERICAN

HERITAGE LANGUAGE STUDENTS

American heritage language students include

children of native American background, foreign-

born immigrants who came to the United States at

a young age, the native-born children of foreign-

born immigrants, and occasionally the native-

born children of native-born individuals of immi-

grant background. The experiences of these her-

itage speakers are similar. They speak or hear the

heritage language spoken at home and in their

immediate communities, but, with few exceptions

(e.g., Foreign Language Elementary School pro-

grams, Bilingual Education), they receive their

formal education entirely in English. They receive

no instruction in the heritage language during the

elementary or secondary grades and, as a result,

become literate only in English.

Heritage Learners as L1/L2 Users

In the last several years, Vivian Cook, a very

distinguished researcher in the area of SLA, has

made a strong case for the study of what he refers

to as multicompetence (Cook, 1992, 2002). He has

argued that it is of particular importance for the

SLA ﬁeld to engage in the study of the L2 user, an

individual who has knowledge of and uses a L2,

rather than to engage in the exclusive study of the

L2 learner, an individual whose task of acquisition

is seen as not yet ﬁnished. Drawing from research

on bilingualism, he has pointed out, moreover,

that L2 users are, by deﬁnition, different from

monolingual speakers. Rejecting the view that the

ultimate state of L2 learning is to pass undetected

among native speakers, Cook (2002) emphasized

that “the minds, languages and lives of L2 users

are different from those of monolinguals,” and

that “L2 users are not failures because they are dif-

ferent” (p. 9). In suggesting the term L2 user and

rejecting the designation bilingual, Cook (2002)

pointed out that the term has “contradictory deﬁ-

nitions and associations in both popular and aca-

demic usage” (p. 4).

Although I do not disagree with Cook about

the contradictory deﬁnitions of the term bilin-

gual, I nevertheless argue that the term L2 user

is not entirely appropriate for the description of

heritage language learners who may, at different

points in their lives, exhibit various degrees of

414 The Modern Language Journal 89 (2005)

language expertise and language afﬁliation in

spite of their language inheritance (Leung,

Harris, & Rampton, 1997; Rampton, 1997). Even

though the term L2 user implies the continued

use of the L1, and even though recent work on L2

users (Cook, 2003a) is clearly concerned about

the relationship of the L1 to the L2 and of the L2

to the L1, it is my position that the term L2 user still

tends to emphasize and focus attention primarily

on the L2. In this article, I therefore use the term

L1/L2 user interchangeably with heritage student

to describe heritage learners, many of whom ac-

quire the L2 in a combination of naturalistic and

instructed settings.

The L1/L2 User Continuum

Although absolutely equivalent abilities in two

languages are theoretically possible, except for

rare geographical and familial accidents, individ-

uals seldom have access to two languages in ex-

actly the same contexts in every domain of inter-

action. L1/L2 users do not have the opportunity

to use two languages to carry out the exact same

functions with all individuals with whom they in-

teract or to use their languages intellectually to

the same degree. They thus do not develop iden-

tical strengths in both languages. Heritage L1/L2

users are bilingual individuals who manifest very

different strengths in their two languages and who

may best be thought of as falling along a contin-

uum of different types of bilinguals such as that

presented in Figure 1.

In Figure 1, different size fonts indicate differ-

ent language strengths in language A and lan-

guage B for different L1/L2 users. A recently

arrived immigrant, for example, might be repre-

sented as Ab (dominant in the immigrant lan-

guage and in the beginning stages of learning

English). Similarly, a fourth-generation L1/L2

user could be represented as Ba (having acquired

English as a L1, dominant in English, and still

retaining some proﬁciency in the immigrant lan-

guage). In minority language communities all

FIGURE 1

A Continuum of L1/L2 Users

Monolingual Monolingual

A Ab Ab Ab Ab Ab AB aB aB Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba B

over the world, such different types of L1/L2 users

live together and interact with each other and with

monolinguals on a daily basis, using one or the

other of their two languages. L1/L2 users will ﬂuc-

tuate in their preference or perceived strengths in

each language, depending on the nature of the in-

teraction, the topic of discussion, the domain of

activity, and the formality or the informality of the

situation.

Heritage Learners (L1/L2 Users) as Speakers of

Contact Varieties of Language

L1/L2 users are speakers of what is known in

the ﬁeld of bilingualism and sociolinguistics as

contact varieties of language. Languages are said

to be in contact (Weinreich, 1974)when they are

used alternately by the same speakers to engage

in communication. A Singaporean youngster, for

example, who uses Chinese at home, English

in school, Malay in the market place, and both

Chinese and English with his same-age friends,

lives in a setting in which Malay, English, and

Chinese are in contact. The young speaker him-

self is considered to be the locus of language

contact.

Contact varieties of language have developed

in very different types of settings all over the

world, most frequently as a result of a socio-

historical background involving nation-building,

conquest, colonization, and immigration. Exam-

ples include the so-called New Englishes spoken

around the world in postcolonial settings (e.g., In-

dian English); the varieties of Spanish spoken by

Quechua, Aymara, and Maya bilinguals in Latin

America; as well as Canadian French; Louisiana

French; Chicano English; and varieties of U.S.

Spanish. In the United States, all non-English lan-

guages spoken by indigenous or immigrant mi-

norities as well as by political refugees, exiles, and

professional elites are in contact with English in

that these non-English languages are used alter-

nately with English by the same speakers. As is

the case with all languages in contact—depending

Guadalupe Vald´

es 415

on a variety of social factors—the results of such

contact may include language shift (the abandon-

ment of the regular use of the non-English lan-

guage) as well as development of ways of speaking

that are different from those used by monolingual

speakers in countries of origin. In such settings,

bilingual individuals develop a special bilingual

communication mode (Grosjean, 1997), used pri-

marily with other bilinguals, that is character-

ized by widespread borrowing of lexical items as

well as by code-switching, the alternating use of

two languages at word, phrase, or clause levels.

Over time, contact varieties of language are often

characterized by loss, addition, and replacement

of linguistic features.

The Knowledge Systems of L1/L2 Users: A

Bilingualist Perspective

By deﬁnition, L1/L2 users have internalized

two implicit linguistic knowledge systems, one in

each of their languages. Whether they acquired

the societal language and the heritage language

simultaneously as infants or sequentially as young

children or as adolescents, L1/L2 users utilize

their two languages on an everyday basis with in-

terlocutors who are both monolingual in each of

their two languages as well as bilingual in both lan-

guages. Moreover, as Grosjean (1985) and Cook

(1997) have argued, L1/L2 users are not two

monolinguals in one, but rather speciﬁc speaker-

hearers who have acquired their two languages

in particular contexts and for particular reasons.

Viewed from a bilingualist rather than a mono-

lingualist perspective, L1/L2 users have acquired

two knowledge systems that they use in order carry

out their particular communicative needs, needs

that may be quite unlike those of monolingual

native speakers who use a single language in all

communicative interactions.

Also arguing for a bilingualist perspective on

L1/L2 users, Grosjean (1997) contended that, at

any given moment, bilinguals are in states of acti-

vation of their languages and language processing

mechanisms that are either monolingual or bilin-

gual. Depending on the base language used and

the interlocutors involved, a L1/L2 user will be

either in (a) a monolingual mode in language A,

(b) a monolingual mode in language B, or (c) a

bilingual mode. While the language user is in one

or the other of the monolingual modes, the other

language is deactivated to some extent and trans-

fer between the two languages is reduced. While

the speaker is in the bilingual mode, however, be-

cause both languages are active, transfer between

the two languages as well as the tendency to code-

switch is evident to a greater degree. Grosjean

argued that, since language behavior in different

modes most probably reﬂects how bilinguals pro-

cess their two languages, research on bilingual

competence and performance must take into ac-

count language mode.

The notion of the native speaker—especially as

applied to bilingual individuals—is neither sim-

ple, obvious, nor straightforward (Davis, 1991,

2003). From some perspectives (e.g., Coulmas,

1981), potential informants can only be speakers

“whose ﬁrst language it is” (p. 4). According to

this view, there is a qualitative difference between

a L1 and a L2. Other students of the concept of na-

tive speaker take an even more extreme position.

Ballmer (1981), for example, argued that bilin-

gual individuals are not native speakers of either

of their languages. According to Kramsch (1997),

“originally, native speakership was viewed as an un-

controversial privilege of birth. Those who were

born into a language were considered its native

speakers, with grammatical intuitions that non-

native speakers did not have” (p. 363). Kramsch

argued that a close examination of the concept

reveals that it has often been linked to social class

and to education. She maintained that the native-

speaker norm that has been recognized by for-

eign language departments in the United States,

for example, is that of “the middle-class, ethni-

cally dominant male citizenry of nation-states” (p.

363). By implication, the language of non-middle-

class citizens of such nations has been considered

suspect.

Taking a slightly different perspective, Haugen

(1970) contended that the native-speaker norm,

even as a popular concept, is difﬁcult to apply to

most bilinguals:

To be natively competent in two languages would

then mean to have had two childhoods, so that all

the joys and frustrations of the fundamental period

of life could penetrate one’s emotional response to

the simple words of the language. It would mean to

have acquired the skills of reading and writing that

go with two separate educational systems such as all

literate societies now impose on their adolescents, or

the corresponding rigorous forms of initiation and

skill development that formed part of all nonliterate

societies. It would mean to have two different identi-

ties, one looking at the world from one point of view,

the other from another: it would mean sharing in the

social forms, prejudices, and insights of two cultures.

In short, it would mean being two entirely different

people. (p. 225)

More important, is it perhaps not the case that

all monolingual native speakers would be success-

ful if measured against the norm of the educated

416 The Modern Language Journal 89 (2005)

native speaker? It thus makes little sense to use

a monolingual native-speaker norm to evaluate

the competence of L1/L2 users. As Cook (1997)

has argued, it is not clear why we should “ever

compare two types of people in terms of a book-

keeping exercise of proﬁt and loss” (p. 294).

QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE STUDY OF

L1/L2 USERS

The greatest challenge facing the foreign lan-

guage profession in teaching L1/L2 users who

elect to maintain or develop their L1 in formal in-

structional settings is the design of instruction that

is not only appropriate for their current and fu-

ture needs but that is also based on coherent the-

ories of instructed language acquisition for these

particular groups of learners. Ideally, pedagogi-

cal approaches designed for L1/L2 users would

be based on an understanding of the implicit lin-

guistic knowledge systems of these learners and

on a familiarity with the processes involved when

speakers of such nondominant ﬁrst languages at-

tempt to develop or re-acquire these languages

in formal instructional settings. At present, al-

though we have some knowledge of the role of

instruction in restructuring the interlanguages of

L2 learners,3we have no information about the

role of formal instruction in restructuring or re-

shaping the knowledge systems of learners who

are in many ways quite different from traditional

classroom learners.

Identifying Key Differences among L1/L2 Users

Given the complexity of the bilingual experi-

ence and the fact that there are few L1/L2 users

who are ambilingual, we can hypothesize that

there are important differences in the implicit

linguistic knowledge systems of various types of

L1/L2 users who are grouped under the label

heritage speakers in an academic context. A re-

search agenda designed to support theories of the

development/reacquisition of heritage languages

that are acquired as L1s by these users, therefore,

would need to begin by developing procedures

for examining similarities and differences among

individual heritage speakers of the same language

as well as between categories of heritage speakers

of different languages. These procedures would

be directed to the development of typologies of

heritage speakers that are potentially important

for classroom instruction. What are needed are

typologies that go beyond the traditional genera-

tional categorizations (ﬁrst, second, third gener-

ation) of immigrant speakers commonly used in

sociolinguistic research as well as beyond other

categorizations that have focused on recency of

arrival, schooling, and access to the standard lan-

guage (e.g., Vald´

es, 1995). For pedagogical pur-

poses, useful classiﬁcations should be able to pro-

vide information about the linguistic proﬁciencies

of L1/L2 users, the characteristics of their under-

lying implicit knowledge systems, and the differ-

ences among L1/L2 users of the same generation

and background.

In order to provide adequate instruction for

L1/L2 users, it is important to determine not only

speaking ﬂuency in general, but also the number

of registers and varieties that speakers can pro-

duce and understand as well as their levels of lit-

eracy in the heritage language. Fine-grained cat-

egorizations are a necessary preliminary to the

detailed study of both inter- and intraheritage

learner variation in the various subsystems of

their nondominant language. Assessment proce-

dures are needed that adapt or draw directly from

methodologies used in the study of fossilization

in L2 learners (Han, 2003) and that include oral

and written proﬁciency tests, dialect- and register-

sensitive cloze procedures (Gibbons & Ramirez,

2004), and grammaticality or acceptability judg-

ments. A focus on the linguistic forms frequently

examined by L2 researchers might be especially

useful in comparing L1/L2 users with L2 learners

and in examining the role of instruction in the de-

velopment/reacquisition of heritage languages in

classroom contexts.

Identifying the Communal Language

It is clear that, in order to understand the

knowledge systems of L1/L2 users, an analytical

model is needed that is capable not only of “trac-

ing changes in relative L1 competence over time,

after immigrants have arrived in the L2 environ-

ment” (Kenny, 1996, p. 6), but also of providing

information about what Mufwene (2001) referred

to as the communal language to which they have

been exposed as well as the I-Language (an indi-

vidual speaker’s idiolect). A speaker who has been

raised in a community within which the commu-

nal language is a contact variety of that language,

for example, will produce speech that may appear

ﬂawed from the perspective of an urban or pres-

tige monolingual variety. Such seemingly ﬂawed

speech, however, might nevertheless be gener-

ated by a fully acquired linguistic system that has

not undergone attrition. As Kenny (1996) argued,

in understanding language loss or attrition, re-

searchers must go beyond a structural approach

that is limited to the identiﬁcation and analysis of

Guadalupe Vald´

es 417

linguistic elements that appear to be either dif-

ferent or missing when compared to the speech

of normative L1 speakers. In immigrant commu-

nities, the various incoming varieties of the her-

itage language may have converged to produce a

new dialect through processes involving accom-

modation, the development of interdialectalisms,

leveling, and simpliﬁcation (Penny, 2000). The re-

sulting communal language may have undergone

a series of both downward and upward changes

through the imitation of both the features used

by high prestige speakers as well as features used

by less privileged speakers who nevertheless en-

joy covert prestige. Features that were stigma-

tized in the original home country, for example,

may spread among speakers who need particular

“street credibility” (Penny, 2000, p. 69). In addi-

tion, moreover, through its contact with the domi-

nant language, the communal language may have

also undergone contact-induced language change

(Thomason, 2001; Thomason & Kaufman, 1988)

through lexical and structural borrowing. Finally,

changes may have taken place in the communal

language that, while originating in the monolin-

gual environment, may have been accelerated be-

cause of contact with the dominant language.4

TOWARDS A THEORY OF HERITAGE

LANGUAGE REACQUISITION/

DEVELOPMENT

Brieﬂy stated, the real world problem in the

case of L1/L2 users who elect to study their L1

formally is designing instruction that is appropri-

ate to their current and future needs and goals. In

order to design appropriate instruction, it is nec-

essary to determine which students—by formally

studying their L1—are involved in one or more of

the following processes: (a) acquisition of incom-

pletely acquired features of the L1 as a “second”

language, (b) ﬁrst language (re-)acquisition in-

volving the acquisition of features that have under-

gone attrition, (c) acquisition of a second dialect

(D2 acquisition), (d) development of discourse

skills in the written and oral language including

the acquisition of formal registers and styles (R2

acquisition) and literacy, and (e) expansion of re-

ceptive proﬁciencies into productive grammars.

Incomplete Acquisition of the Heritage Language

Some heritage speakers seeking formal instruc-

tion in their L1 may have incompletely acquired

some features of the language. In her work on

the Spanish of Los Angeles, for example, Silva-

Corval´

an (1994, 2003a, 2003b) reported on the

Spanish of young children in Los Angeles who

at school age had not yet acquired the complete

tense, aspect, and mood system of Spanish. Ex-

planations she considered include (a) the limited

access to Spanish language input, given that in Los

Angeles the use of Spanish in the home appears

to be much less frequent among both second-

and third-generation speakers than among ﬁrst-

generation speakers; and (b) the extended, in-

tensive contact with the societal language in the

school context, which appears to interrupt the

normal process of L1 acquisition in later child-

hood. Heritage language children move through

the same stages of acquisition at an early stage as

do youngsters in monolingual settings, although

at possibly a different rate and, once the L2 be-

comes dominant, their use of the L1 decreases

signiﬁcantly. Silva-Corval´

an argued that, without

L1-based school support, such children would not

completely acquire the linguistic system of the lan-

guage as used by normative L1 speakers.

The use of a simpliﬁed verb system (as well as

the uneven control of the heritage language of-

ten made evident by the constant use of pauses,

hesitations, and ﬁllers) may not, however, indicate

that the language has been incompletely acquired

by a heritage speaker. What will not be immedi-

ately clear from superﬁcial assessments is whether

ﬂawed production is due to interrupted acquisi-

tion, individual language attrition, or “full” acqui-

sition of a contact variety of the heritage language

that is now quite different from the varieties of

the heritage language originally brought to the

community.

A theory of instruction supporting the devel-

opment/reacquisition of a nondominant L1 for

such learners will require an understanding of

how and whether the implicit systems of speak-

ers who have incompletely acquired the heritage

language, speakers whose heritage language has

undergone attrition, and speakers of a heritage

language that has undergone extensive change

are alike or different. What needs to be explored

is how these different systems—if indeed they are

different—might be reshaped by formal instruc-

tion. In the case of incomplete acquisition, the in-

structional problem to be solved might involve, for

example, the full acquisition of tense, aspect, and

mood in the L1. Instructional approaches might,

therefore, include L2 methodologies used in the

teaching of both the oral and written language to

L2 learners.

Reacquisition of Features after Attrition

In the case of language attrition (the ero-

sion, decay, contraction, or obsolescence of a lan-

guage), the process of reacquisition might be

418 The Modern Language Journal 89 (2005)

quite different. Much attention, therefore, must

be given to the study of suspected language attri-

tion among heritage learners. What needs to be

understood is both the process and the speed of

attrition in individuals who are members of par-

ticular communities as well as the subsystems that

undergo attrition. In a foundational article on lan-

guage attrition, Anderson (1982) argued that lan-

guage attrition researchers must take into account

comprehension and production, uses of both oral

and written language, traditional linguistic levels

(i.e., phonology, morphology, syntax) as well as

functions, domains of use, and discourse com-

petencies of the speakers in question. Anderson

maintained that for each linguistic feature exam-

ined, researchers must have what he terms a base-

line comparison (p. 85); that is, they must have two

types of normative data: (a) the normal use of par-

ticular features by fully competent speakers, and

(b) the use of the features by the individuals being

studied before they underwent language attrition.

Anderson emphasized that a distinction must be

made between dysfunctional attrition, which causes

a reduction in communication, and cosmetic attri-

tion, which involves the reduction of features that

are socially valued but which does not interfere

with communication.

Unfortunately, diagnosing attrition and distin-

guishing attrition from incomplete acquisition as

well as from full acquisition of a contact variety

of a language on the basis of language assessment

procedures is not simple. The same features listed

by Anderson to signal attrition (use of analytic

vs. synthetic structures, use of lexical borrowings,

convergence of syntactic form, cognate transfer,

literal translation) could be indicative of all three

types of conditions. In the case of language attri-

tion, the goal of instruction is either reacquisition

of the subsystems that have undergone attrition,

or the reversal of ongoing attrition of particular

subsystems and features, or both. One can conjec-

ture that if attrition is caused by a removal from

“the type and quantity of linguistic input and lin-

guistic interaction necessary to maintain the full

lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntac-

tic distinctions that are made by ﬂuent compe-

tent speakers of this language” (Anderson, 1982,

p. 91), reversal of attrition would need to in-

volve rich input and intensive interaction typical

of monolingual linguistic environments. Without

evidence to the contrary, one could not conclude

that direct forms or form-focused instruction or

other typical pedagogies used in L2 instruction

would be particularly beneﬁcial in the process of

reacquisition or reversal of attrition. This is, how-

ever, an empirical question, and one that can only

be answered by examining the effects of different

types of instruction designed to reverse attrition

in a category of students who have been carefully

identiﬁed as having undergone attrition in their

heritage language.

Instruction for Heritage Speakers of Contact Varieties:

D2 and R2 Acquisition

For the L1/L2 user who has fully acquired a

communal language that has undergone exten-

sive changes through its contact with other vari-

eties of the same language and with the dominant

language, the instructional problem to be solved

is quite different. If the goal is for such speak-

ers to acquire the normative monolingual variety

through formal instruction, what needs to be un-

derstood is the process of D2 acquisition. These

L1/L2 users are not involved in acquiring parts

of a system that they have incompletely acquired,

nor are they involved in reacquiring subsystems

that have been lost. In this case, heritage speakers

are involved in acquiring an additional variety of

the same language. What they must learn is which

features of the communal language correspond

to the features of the normative monolingual va-

rieties of the language and which features do not.

A possible theory of D2 acquisition, for example,

might parallel theories of L2 acquisition and pro-

pose that in acquiring D2s, learners move through

a set of interdialect grammars until they reach

the desired end state. In addition, if the goal of

heritage language instruction is also for these D2

learners to develop reading and writing skills, lit-

eracy instruction would ideally be based on an

understanding of the differences and similarities

between literacy acquisition in a D2 and literacy

acquisition in both a L1 and a L2.

If the goal of heritage language instruction for

L1/L2 users who are acquiring a D2 is also for

them to extend their repertoires to include styles

and registers of the heritage language appropriate

for communicating in academic or professional

settings, instruction must be based on an under-

standing of the acquisition of additional registers

by monolingual speakers who have not had ac-

cess to contexts in which these particular registers

are used. The instructional goal to be achieved in

this case is the acquisition of additional registers

(R2 acquisition), that is, a set of discourse prac-

tices that are directly tied to values and norms

of a particular social group (Gee, 1990). As Gee

also pointed out, however, particular discourse

practices are difﬁcult to acquire in classroom set-

tings because learners may have little or no access

to speakers who use these particular specialized

Guadalupe Vald´

es 419

registers. In attempting to add such higher reg-

isters of their heritage language to their reper-

toires, L1/L2 users may attempt to produce these

registers by transferring and adapting features of

similar registers from their L2. A possible theory

of R2 acquisition might, therefore, parallel theo-

ries of L2 and D2 acquisition and propose, as did

Vald´

es and Geoffrion-Vinci (1998), that in acquir-

ing second or additional registers, learners move

through a set of interregisters until they reach

the desired end state. Clearly, in order to develop

adequate and effective instruction for heritage

learners whose goal it is to acquire additional vari-

eties and registers of the heritage language, care-

ful research must be carried out on the process

of D2 and R2 acquisition in naturalistic settings as

well as on the effects of different types of instruc-

tion on both of these processes.

Receptive and Productive Grammars

A ﬁnal category of heritage speakers includes

L1/L2 users who cannot or will not speak the her-

itage language although they are able to partici-

pate in interpersonal, face-to-face communication

with bilingual individuals who speak to them in

this language. These passive L1/L2 users exhibit

strong receptive proﬁciencies in their heritage

language, which, although limited, still exceed

the receptive proﬁciencies acquired by beginning

and even intermediate learners of a foreign lan-

guage. At a minimum, receptive L1/L2 users offer

evidence of having acquired what Clark (2003)

referred to as C-representations, that is, a system

of representations for comprehension of the lan-

guage that allows them to parse the stream of

speech into meaningful units. How this system

is related to the productive system in the L1 and

to the receptive and productive systems in the L2

is of central importance to the development of

pedagogical approaches for developing the exist-

ing proﬁciencies of such speakers in a classroom

setting. A theory of heritage language growth

or development for such individuals must be

based on a better understanding of comprehen-

sion and production grammars (Swain, Dumas, &

Naiman, 1974). We need to understand (a)

how and why these two types of knowledge sys-

tems develop independently, (b) how compre-

hension and production grammars are related,

grammars supports the acquisition of production

grammars in speciﬁc ways, and (d) whether these

individuals are more similar to L2 learners than

to L1 speakers.

Questions for the Study of Instructed Heritage

Language Acquisition

In sum, the challenge of designing instruction

in the L1 for L1/L2 users raises a number of im-

portant theoretical issues for practitioners who

want to maintain or develop heritage languages

as well as for researchers seeking to understand

the human language faculty. Some of these ques-

tions include:

1. How can the different sources of “ﬂawed”

language production (interlanguages? inter-

dialects? interregisters?) in the L1 of L1/L2 users

be identiﬁed?

2. How does the “ﬂawed” language production

of L1/L2 users compare with that of L2 learners?

3. How do monolingual L1 speakers acquire a

range of registers and genres in their L1?

4. What is the order of acquisition of particular

features of R2s and second genres by L1 speakers?

5. How do monolingual L1 speakers acquire a

D2?

6. What is the order of acquisition of particular

features in a D2 by L1 speakers?

7. Are notions of interdialect or interregister

useful in describing the acquisition of additional

registers and dialects of L1 by L1/L2 users?

8. What types of conditions account for the ac-

quisition of receptive versus productive compe-

tence in L1/L2 users?

9. How can comprehension grammars (as op-

posed to productive grammars) be described?

10. What accounts for the development of ex-

ceptional bilinguals (simultaneous interpreters)

among heritage speakers (see Vald´

es, 2003)?

11. What can formal classroom instruction ac-

complish for L1/L2 users? Are there types of

instruction that can reverse language attrition?

What types of instruction can result in the acqui-

sition of a range of registers and styles?

CHANGING THE FIELD: COMMUNITIES OF

PRACTICE AND DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES

In considering a reconceptualization or expan-

sion of the ﬁeld of SLA that could take on the

challenge of examining the questions presented

above, researchers might ﬁrst examine existing

professional communities of practice and make

evident the epistemological and methodological

assumptions and research traditions that are part

of each contributing ﬁeld. In a recent work on

the nature of academic language (Vald´

es, 2004),

I argued that scholarly discussions do not take

place in a social vacuum. Even without the insights

420 The Modern Language Journal 89 (2005)

offered by the Bakhtin Circle5about the nature

of intertextuality, it is very generally accepted

that scholars engage in an ongoing dialogue with

other members of their academic communities

and their professional organizations. Scholars re-

spond to each other’s papers, engage in polemi-

cal debates about theories and their implications,

and write dense scholarly tomes, sometimes un-

derstandable exclusively to other members of the

same inner scholarly circle. The context for all

discussions, including academic debates, encom-

passes a multitude of dialogues that help shape, re-

conﬁgure, and constantly change the multivoiced

utterances of the various speakers. The discussion

of L2 acquisition, with its focus on L2 learners, is

no exception. The various existing approaches in

SLA have developed and evolved in communica-

tion with a particular set of voices that are part of

speciﬁc professional worlds. The study of heritage

language speakers and the discussion of heritage

language students, as well, have taken place in

separate communities of practice. Given the vari-

ous boundaries of academic professions, the dia-

logues about these particular areas of knowledge

are unfortunately made up of a series of uncon-

nected conversations that often fail to be heard by

scholars who are members of other closely related

professions.

Heritage language speakers have been the fo-

cus of researchers engaged in the study of bilin-

gualism. As is made evident by Figure 2, bilingual-

ism has been studied from the perspectives of the

disciplines of sociolinguistics, linguistics, and psy-

cholinguistics.

Research conducted from the perspective of

each of these three disciplines asks different ques-

tions about the nature of bilingualism and bilin-

gual individuals. The sociolinguistic study of bilin-

gualism, for example, has centered on the study

of societal bilingualism. Phenomena such as lan-

guage maintenance, language shift, reversal of

language shift, and language death have been of

particular interest to sociolinguists. By compari-

son, linguistic studies of bilingualism focus pri-

marily on understanding how languages in con-

tact can inﬂuence one another and how gram-

matical changes due to language contact differ

from other kinds of grammatical changes. Re-

searchers working in this tradition, for example,

have attended to grammatical borrowing and the

examination of the inﬂuences of one language

on another, including phonological, morpholog-

ical, syntactic, and lexical transfer. Researchers

have attempted to classify types of borrowing, to

identify the social and cultural determinants of

such borrowing, and to examine structural con-

straints on borrowing. The psycholinguistic study

of bilingualism, however, centers on study of the

bilingual individual. Four general areas have been

of particular interest to researchers: (a) bilin-

guistic development and attrition, (b) informa-

tion processing in bilingual individuals, (c) neu-

ropsychological foundations of bilingualism, and

(d) bilingualism and cognition. Studies of bilin-

guistic development include research on stages of

bilingual development, differentiation in linguis-

tic systems, age-related speciﬁcs of consecutive

bilinguality, and the role of context in bilingual ac-

quisition. Research on information processing in

bilinguals includes work on language representa-

tion, bilingual memory, and separate versus com-

mon processors. Attention has also been given

to the development of models of bilingual in-

formation processing. Neuropsychological stud-

ies of bilingualism, however, include a focus on

hemispheric preference and on neuropsycholog-

ical development.6

As seen in Figure 2, then, the broad study of

bilingualism involves three different but related

disciplines: sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and

linguistics. As will also be noted from the ﬁgure,

however, the study of incipient bilingualism, the

focus of SLA research, is only a narrow subarea

of the ﬁeld of bilingualism, the use of two lan-

guages across a lifespan. Moreover, as a number

of researchers have recently pointed out, SLA pri-

marily draws from the ﬁelds of linguistics and psy-

cholinguistics (Atkinson, 2002; Block, 2003; Firth

& Wagner, 1997; Johnson, 2004). It does not at-

tend to the social context of language use in a

broad sense, and it has, to date, focused primarily

on L2 learners rather than L2 users. Figure 2 sug-

gests that the study of SLA should also involve the

perspectives of the sociolinguistic study of bilin-

gualism.

Finally, in the United States, the language edu-

cation ﬁeld encompasses both L1 teaching and L2

or foreign language teaching. In the case of vari-

ous aspects of L1 teaching and learning, the lan-

guage education ﬁeld draws from research in lin-

guistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics to

focus on the language development of L1 speak-

ers, on the acquisition of academic English by

speakers of nonstandard varieties of English, and

on the development of reading and writing by

both mainstream and linguistic minority students.

The broad language education ﬁeld has also con-

cerned itself with the acquisition of English and

with the acquisition of foreign languages. SLA,

the study of incipient bilingualism, is but a small

area of the language education ﬁeld and has pri-

marily informed L2 teaching. It is interesting that

Guadalupe Vald´

es 421

FIGURE 2

The Study of Bilingualism

L1/L2 users who enroll in the study of their L1

have been studied not by L1 researchers, and un-

til recently, not by SLA researchers, but by the

community of foreign language teaching practi-

tioners and researchers as well as by linguists and

sociolinguists who are often members of foreign

language department faculties.

The various communities of professional prac-

tice delineated here ordinarily have little to do

with one another. Published research in jour-

nals rarely includes the perspectives of members

of other communities of practice. Even when

present at conferences, members of the various

communities (e.g., L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition,

language pedagogy, sociolinguistics) may attend

competing sessions because large meetings are

generally not organized to provide opportunities

for dialogue among experts who are part of differ-

ent professional compartments. Epistemological

and technical questions are drawn from long-term

traditions within each professional community.

What counts as knowledge, what questions are

worthy of attention, how theories are formulated

and tested, and how research is carried out are

part of the socializing professional experiences of

every researcher.

Opportunities Lost or Seized?

In imagining the reconceptualization and ex-

pansion of SLA that engages in the study of L1/L2

users and that takes seriously societal needs in the

area of language education, I also imagine a con-

tinuing conversation between members of the var-

ious compartments depicted in Figure 2. Using as

a point of departure what I referred to at the be-

ginning of this article as “the most intractable edu-

cational problems involving language,” a number

of areas and questions that are crucial to school

success of linguistic minority children all over the

world come to mind. Given limitations of space,

however, I will propose only three topics for con-

tinued consideration.

Terms Used to Refer to the Language Education Field

The terms used to refer to an area of inquiry

are basic to the deﬁnition of a ﬁeld. Unfortu-

nately, the term Second Language Acquisition,as

Block (2003) argued, has “built-in assumptions

about monolingualism and separable L1 and L2

competences” (p. 44). A reconceptualization of

language learning in various language education

422 The Modern Language Journal 89 (2005)

contexts that can embrace the needs of L1/L2

users must of necessity view the language educa-

tion ﬁeld as including L1 instruction in its many

manifestations and involving several types of lan-

guage acquisition and development (i.e., acquisi-

tion of D2s, acquisition of a standard language,

acquisition and development of specialized lan-

guage registers and styles, acquisition of written

language) as well as L2 instruction that takes into

account beginning, intermediate, and advanced

learners. I propose, therefore, that the term In-

structed Language Acquisition (ILA) be considered

carefully as a way of including a variety of ques-

tions and issues that will broaden the scope of

the existing ﬁeld. Alternatively, I suggest that the

term Educational Linguistics proposed by Spolsky

(1978) be discussed as a label that clearly signals

the involvement of SLA in educational contexts.

Moving beyond the Monolingual Norm

As Cook (2002) argued in proposing a shift in

the perspective of SLA researchers, the study of

L1/L2 users requires a viewpoint that no longer

focuses exclusively on the educated monolingual

native speaker. It requires an understanding of

both societal and individual bilingualism and a

consideration of the methodological issues cen-

tral to the study of the language behavior of bilin-

gual persons that were raised by Wei (2000). As

do other students of bilingualism, Wei has main-

tained that, in bilingualism studies, issues such

as the bilinguality and ethnic origin of the re-

searcher, the researcher’s attitude toward bilin-

gualism, the deﬁnition of language used by the re-

searcher, the research agenda of the researcher,

and his or her choice of appropriate methods for

answering particular research questions are of key

importance in obtaining valid results.

Expanding the investigation of instructed lan-

guage acquisition beyond L2 learners to include

L1/L2 users will also involve a rethinking of partic-

ipant selection. Bilingual individuals do not con-

stitute a homogeneous group and thus cannot be

grouped together by SLA researchers without risk-

ing the almost immediate dismissal of the research

by students of bilingualism. Citing Grosjean

(1998), Wei (2000) pointed out that in choosing

bilingual speakers in research the following fac-

tors should be considered: (a) language history

and language relationship, (b) language stability,

ciency, (e) language modes, and (f) biographical

data.

Finally, moving beyond the monolingual norm

must involve the rejection of the standard mono-

lingual language (e.g., standard Spanish, stan-

dard Russian) as the norm against which the

L1/L2 users are measured. If researchers are seri-

ous about deﬁnitions of multicompetence (Cook

2002, 2003b) and about the rejection of the knowl-

edge of the native speaker as the ultimate goal of

L2 acquisition, they cannot simply compare pro-

duction by L1/L2 users with that of native speak-

ers of the standard language.

Potential Contributions of Various Areas

of Knowledge to Speciﬁc Language Problems

The identiﬁcation and examination of speciﬁc

language problems and the potential contribu-

tions of various areas of knowledge to the solution

of these problems might well provide an organiz-

ing framework for examining ethical issues revolv-

ing around knowledge and utilization. However,

as Spolsky (1978) pointed out when discussing

the ﬁeld of educational linguistics many years ago,

the notion that linguistic theories can be used di-

rectly in the solution of educational problems is

na¨

ıve. Today, addressing educational problems in-

volving language will require the collaboration of

researchers from many different backgrounds, in-

cluding nonlinguist educational researchers who

have a deep understanding of educational policy,

schools, classrooms, and ways in which knowledge

about language might inform particular practices.

A discussion of speciﬁc problems and the ways

they can be approached from the perspective of

different areas of inquiry can lead to a better un-

derstanding of what it means to generate theoret-

ical knowledge and to contribute to educational

practice.

CONCLUSION

In this article, I have called for the reconceptu-

alization and expansion of the ﬁeld of SLA by us-

ing the teaching of heritage languages to L1/L2

users as a lens through which such a reconcep-

tualization and expansion might be envisioned.

I maintain that in taking seriously the questions

raised by the teaching of a nondominant L1, SLA

can position itself to respond to criticisms leveled

at it because of its seeming narrowness and exclu-

sive preoccupation with L2s from the perspective

of cognitive psychology. I also maintain that the

most difﬁcult problems in education today involve

issues of language and groups of children who

are acquiring or are using the societal language

while at the same time interacting with family and

community members who speak a heritage lan-

guage. The expansion of SLA to the study and

Guadalupe Vald´

es 423

examination not only of the acquisition of L2, but

also of L1 development in minority populations,

L1 reacquisition, D2 acquisition, and R2 acquisi-

tion has much to offer both to the theory and

the practice of instructed (rather than second)

language acquisition. There is much that the study

of L1/L2 users can contribute to our understand-

ing of the human language faculty. S´

anchez and

Toribio (2003), for example, provided an excel-

lent overview of the theoretical understandings

that can be drawn from the study of bilingual

speakers, including: characteristics of native lan-

guage decline, identiﬁcation of formal features re-

sistant to deterioration, differences between faulty

morphology in production and impairments in

the interpretation of aspect, permeability of L1

grammars, and the structure of unconscious ab-

stract linguistic knowledge as viewed through the

use of grammaticality judgments of code-switched

forms.

Expanding SLA to engage in the study of the

possible results of L1 instruction for students

who have already acquired some competence in

this language bridges the distance between lan-

guage education and a research ﬁeld. Experi-

ence in attempting to teach the L1 to speak-

ers who use the language in their everyday lives

raises key questions that directly complement in-

terests in L2 acquisition that have shaped the ﬁeld.

These questions include variability in learner lan-

guage, the signiﬁcance of learner error, the im-

pact of input and interaction, language trans-

fer, the characteristics of learner systems at dif-

ferent points in the acquisition/reacquisition/

development process and, perhaps most impor-

tant, the impact of formal instruction on the reac-

quisition/development of language.

Because language occupies a central position

in education, there is a need to address instruc-

tional language problems in ways that can make

a difference in the lives of children who have not

been served well by existing educational institu-

tions. Societal needs in the area of language are

pressing. However, as Pennycook (1994) pointed

out, schools are not “sites where a neutral body

of curricular knowledge is passed on to students,”

but rather “cultural and political arenas within

which various political, cultural, and social forms

are engaged in constant struggle” (p. 297). Ideo-

logical contexts are very much a part of the stu-

dents’ success and failure in the acquisition, reac-

quisition, and development of both L1s and L2s.

A mapping (Wetherell & Potter, 1992) of both

the popular and the scholarly discourse on bilin-

gualism is beyond the scope of this article, but

researchers in instructed SLA who are interested

in contributing to the study of heritage language

learning cannot afford to ignore the multilayered

set of themes that contribute directly to a version

of reality within which monolingualism is viewed

as the normal and ideal human condition and

bilingualism is viewed as profoundly suspect.

A discussion of research goals and social re-

sponsibility cannot take place, moreover, if there

is little knowledge about the most challenging

issues and problems that arise in various edu-

cational contexts or about the most vulnerable

groups of L2 learners and L1/L2 users. Given

the boundaries between areas and ﬁelds, few SLA

researchers have engaged in the extensive study

of minority language issues beginning with lan-

guage policy and planning and including the ex-

amination of social, political, and economic con-

texts in which language education takes place. A

reading of the critical language researchers (e.g.,

Bhatt & Martin-Jones, 1992; Canagarajah, 1999,

2002; Corson, 1997; Fairclough, 1989; Pennycook,

1994; Tollefson, 1991; Wallace, 1992) offers one

perspective on such contexts as does work in the

area of linguistic human rights (Skutnabb-Kangas,

2000; and Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1995).

The possibility of conceptualizing SLA so that

it brings together researchers from various com-

munities of practice is an exciting one. It is par-

ticularly exciting because of the possible impact

that such a community might have on important

language education issues and on what I have

called the most intractable problems facing mi-

nority youngsters in American schools. I am con-

vinced not only that SLA researchers have a par-

ticular expertise that can contribute in important

ways to the solution of language problems that

affect the lives of minority children all over the

world, but also that the presentation of even con-

tradictory research claims can inform important

policy decisions. In California, for example, the

proponents of Proposition 227, the antibilingual

education initiative, claimed that after 1 year of

English instruction in a classroom of multi-aged

children, these students would be ready for an

all-English academic curriculum. The opponents

of the initiative, including SLA researchers of the

stature of Kenji Hakuta, considered it essential to

engage in the debate and try to bring reason to a

politically charged anti-immigrant movement.

As was made evident by the recent Ebonics con-

troversy (Baugh, 2000), the opinions of university

researchers and scholars often become very much

a part of national debates on issues in which the

public has strong interest. The public’s stereo-

typical view of the isolation of scholars in their

“ivory towers” and the perceived irrelevancy of

424 The Modern Language Journal 89 (2005)

their opinions to public debates has given way

to a view in which scholarly “experts” have taken

on the role of providing information and back-

ground to the courts, media organizations, and

the public in general. As members of profes-

sional media organizations work to provide both

background for their audiences and a balance

of differing opinions, they seek out scholars who

will present their views and participate in what

Tannen (1998) called the “argument culture.”

Scholars are expected not only to engage in a dis-

cussion of the complexity of the issues, but also to

expand the public’s understanding of problems

of enormous signiﬁcance. For the ﬁeld of SLA,

it is time to seize this opportunity to contribute

directly to a broader understanding of language.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation to MLJ review-

ers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of

this article and to Lourdes Ortega, the editor of this spe-

cial issue, for her extraordinarily insightful suggestions.

NOTES

1Vald´

es (1995) includes a deﬁnition of the term lin-

guistic minority and a discussion of various perspectives

on these minorities around the world. The article also

includes a dated, but still useful, view of instruction of

minority languages as academic subjects.

2For an overview of the teaching of Spanish as a her-

itage language see Vald´

es (1995). This overview includes

an examination of the key areas (e.g., the teaching of

grammar, testing and assessment, the teaching of the

standard dialect) examined by both practitioners and

researchers.

3For a recent, thorough discussion of this topic, see

Han (2003).

4Gutierrez (2003), for example, argued that, in Span-

ish, the innovative use of estar in domains previously oc-

cupied by ser had its origin in a monolingual context but

is advancing at a faster rate in bilingual communities in

the United States.

5I use the term Bakhtin Circle in the same way as Du-

ranti and Goodwin (1992) and Moraes (1996) in order

to avoid the debate concerning the speciﬁc authorship

of the works of Voloshinov and Medvedev that have been

attributed to Bakhtin.

6Introductions to ﬁeld of bilingualism include: Ro-

maine (1995), Hamers and Blanc (2000), Wei (2000),

and Bhatia and Ritchie (2004). Wei’s volume is orga-

nized to illustrate the contributions of sociolinguistics,

linguistics, and psycholinguists to the study of bilingual-

ism and includes an excellent bibliography.

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Jul 2023
BSRCCS

This manuscript addresses the phenomenon of masked priming and the cognitive process of switching from Spanish to English while reading in sequential bilingual texts compared to heritage speakers. A lexical decision task was employed in the present study with masked translation priming, which serves as a valuable tool for elucidating the orthographic and lexical processes involved in the initial stages of reading. This study builds upon previous research conducted on monolingual masked priming, which consistently demonstrates shifts in the response time (RT) distributions when comparing related and unrelated primes. Within the framework of a diffusion model, we implemented two theoretical positions. First, we posited that translation priming operates at the orthographic level, resulting in enhanced efficiency during the encoding process. Second, we explored the possibility that translation priming operates at the semantic level, influencing the accumulation of evidence during the lexical decision task. The findings of the present study indicate that translation priming elicits outcomes similar to those observed in monolingual priming paradigms. Specifically, we observed that translation priming facilitation is manifested as shifts in the RT distributions. These findings are interpreted to suggest that the benefits derived from the encoding process are not specific to the accessed lexicon following a brief stimulus presentation.

Asian Immigrant Communities' Civic Participation in Cultivating Bilingualism and Biliteracy in the United States

Chapter

Jan 2019

Kwangok Song

This chapter discusses how Asian immigrant communities in the United States cultivate Asian immigrant children's literacy learning in their heritage languages. Although the United States has historically been a linguistically diverse country, bilingualism has not always been valued and acknowledged. Strong social and institutional expectations for immigrants to acquire the socially dominant language have resulted in language shifts among immigrants. Concerned about their descendants' heritage language loss, Asian immigrant communities make organized efforts to establish community-based heritage language schools. Heritage language schools play an important role in immigrant children's learning of their heritage language and culturally appropriate ways of behaving and communicating. It has also been noted that heritage language schools encounter several challenges in motivating heritage language learners. Heritage language schools should be considered as complementary education for immigrant students because they take critical responsibilities to support immigrant students' language and literacy development in their heritage languages.

Primary School Writing

Chapter

Jan 2018

Teachers' pedagogical writing knowledge, knowledge about their emergent bilingual learners, and valuation of students' L1 have implications for instructional contexts of L2 writing development. Pedagogical approaches to children's bilingual and/or L2 and literacy development have traditionally focused on L2 oral language proficiency, followed by L2 reading, and then L2 writing. However, bilingual scholars have argued with evidence that bilingual children can develop L2 writing while they are learning to speak, listen, and read in English. More specifically, bilingual children may begin L2 writing early on, drawing on their L1 and L1/L2 language knowledge to support L2 composing practices. Accordingly, teachers who serve emergent bilingual children must be prepared to provide linguistically and culturally responsive instruction that supports idea articulation through writing as students simultaneously develop oral, listening, and reading skills in their L2. This entry discusses issues relevant to primary‐age bilingual writers and offers pedagogical recommendations to support biliteracy development.

Japanese language testing in American universities: Research agenda in the new normal米国の大学における日本語テスト評価:ニューノーマルにおける研究課題

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

妃美近藤ブラウン

Higher education has gone through unprecedented emergencies and challenges in changing our instruction and assessment from the traditional face-to-face format to online. American universities and colleges are no exception. The pandemic has had a lasting impact on American higher education. With this background in mind, this paper will start by discussing how the pandemic has transformed our assessment and evaluation practices at higher education in the United States (U.S.) in general, and Japanese language testing in particular. Among the various assessment tools available for teaching Japanese, testing remains the most widely used assessment procedure in the U.S. This paper will raise issues concerning Japanese proficiency standards, criterion-referenced testing for classroom assessments, and grading. It will also discuss the issues related to some of the most influential Japanese proficiency tests in the U.S., i.e., the ACTFL OPI/OPIc, Advanced Placement (AP) exams, and the Nihongo Nōryoku Shiken (Japanese Language Proficiency Test [JLPT]). The paper will demonstrate that more research will be needed on Japanese language assessment and testing from multiple perspectives, such as validity, impact, practicality, and institutional support. It will conclude by providing a future research agenda for assessing Japanese in higher education.

“I want my children to become global citizens”: The role of a heritage language in appreciation of citizenship status in young Korean Australian children and their parents

Article

Jul 2023

Increasing globalisation has spurred a flow of migrants worldwide. These movements include exchanges of migrants’ linguistic repertoires across regions, transforming the ways in which they define themselves in a multilingual society. Unlike identity categories such as ethnic identity, the contested concept of citizenship identity has remained underexplored in heritage language (HL) research. Focusing on Korean migrant families in Australia, this study extends the limited knowledge about the roles of citizenship in HL maintenance across different generations. Specifically, drawing on interviews with six Korean-speaking parents and their children, this study compares the ways in which migrant parents and their primary and secondary school-aged children relate a HL to their citizenship status. Thematic analysis reveals that while HL-speaking children tend to associate their language with national or ethnic identities, migrant parents are more likely to identify their children as global citizens whose HL competencies are essential for their future career and economic advantage. The study contributes to scholarship at the intersection of HL, citizenship, and globalisation.

The Rise and Fall of the Ethnic Revival: Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity

Book

Dec 1985

Language Loss and the Crisis of Cognition: Between Socio- and Psycholinguistics

Book

Jan 1996

K. Dallas Kenny

Variation and Change in Spanish

Book

Nov 2000

Ralph Penny

This book applies recent theoretical insights to trace the development of Castilian and Latin American Spanish from the Middle Ages onwards, through processes of repeated dialect mixing both within the Iberian Peninsula and in the New World. The author contends that it was this frequent mixing which caused Castilian to evolve more rapidly than other varieties of Hispano-Romance, and which rendered Spanish particularly subject to levelling of its linguistic irregularities and to simplification of its structures. These two processes continued as the language extended into and across the Americas. These processes are viewed in the context of the Hispano-Romance dialect continuum, which includes Galician, Portuguese and Catalan, as well as New World varieties. The book emphasises the subtlety and seamlessness of language variation, both geographical and social, and the impossibility of defining strict boundaries between varieties. Its conclusions will be relevant both to Hispanists and to historical sociolinguists more generally.

The Ecology of Language Evolution

Book

Aug 2001

Salikoko Sangol Mufwene

This major 2001 work explores the development of creoles and other new languages, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues they raise for genetic linguistics. Written by an internationally renowned linguist, the book discusses the nature and significance of internal and external factors or 'ecologies' that bear on the evolution of a language. The book surveys a wide range of examples of changes in the structure, function and vitality of languages, and suggests that similar ecologies have played the same kinds of roles in all cases of language evolution. Drawing on major theories of language formation, macroecology and population genetics, Mufwene proposes a common approach to the development of creoles and other new languages. The Ecology of Language Evolution will be welcomed by students and researchers in sociolinguistics, creolistics, theoretical linguistics and theories of evolution.

Bilinguality and Bilingualism

Book

Feb 2000

This updated and revised edition of Hamers and Blanc's successful textbook presents state-of-the-art knowledge about languages in contact from individual bilingualism (or bilinguality) to societal bilingualism. It is both multi- and interdisciplinary in approach, and analyses bilingualism at individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. Linguistic, cognitive and sociocultural aspects of bilingual development are explored, as are problems such as bilingual memory and polyglot aphasia. Hamers and Blanc analyse the relationship between culture, identity, and language behaviour in multicultural settings, as well as the communication strategies in interpersonal and intergroup relations. They also propose theoretical models of language processing and development, which are then applied to bilingual behaviour. Other topics reviewed include language shift, pidgins and creoles, language planning and bilingual education. This book will be invaluable to students, teachers and scholars interested in languages in contact in a range of disciplines including psycholinguistics, linguistics, the social sciences, education and language planning.

TheNative Speaker: Myth and Reality

Book