Heritage Language Reading in the University: A Survey of Students’ Experiences, Strategies, and Preferences

Abstract

This paper examines the reading experiences, strategies, and curriculum preferences of university-level heritage language students. One hundred and twenty eight students enrolled in four different heritage language programs at UCLA—Korean, Russian, Thai, and Vietnamese—completed a survey about their exposure to print, early and current reading experiences, strategy use, learning goals, and preferences. The survey revealed that the majority of the students were interested in achieving university-level academic reading proficiency, yet students reported spending little time reading in their HL despite the availability of print in many of their homes. This might be explained by the fact that students reported not transferring skills from English to the HL and that they perceived themselves to be slow readers. Moreover, most HL students expressed that their reason for learning the HL was to maintain their cultural identity and thus would like to read texts embedded with cultural and historical information in the HL classroom. The survey results underscore the importance of sustaining students’ motivation in HL literacy courses by selecting appropriate materials that are connected to students’ goals for learning the HL, and providing explicit instruction in reading skills and strategies in both English and the HL. Results of this study will be of particular use to HL curriculum planners and material developers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.