Heritage Learners of Spanish

Abstract

This chapter describes the diversity of heritage Spanish speakers, their linguistic systems, and the few studies of pedagogical approaches with these learners that have been carried out to date. Heritage Spanish speakers present a complex set of linguistic, affective, and sociopolitical characteristics. With regard to sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic investigations of their linguistic systems, Montrul summarizes the following areas for future research: (i) A need to determine the features of the input to which heritage learners (HL) are exposed; (ii) A possible integration of the language change perspective of sociolinguists and the cognitive processing perspective of psycholinguists; (iii) Research with HL children, particularly longitudinally; (iv) Agreement on how to determine proficiency. There is still much research needed on HL instruction in all areas: the development of grammar, writing and reading, listening and speaking, phonology, and pragmatics.

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