Project Leader: Maria Polinsky (Harvard University)
This project will build on earlier work done on relative clauses, passives, and agreement in Czech, Persian, Armenian, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. Polinsky (2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2009, 2011), for instance, has found that certain relationships in a sentence are difficult for heritage speakers to grasp. The choice of instructional strategies to address these deficits depends on their origin: they could be caused either by differences in syntactic structure between English and the heritage language (a “structural reason”), or by the lack of control over morphological operations such as case and agreement (a “surface reason”). For this project, Polinsky will focus on Chinese, eliciting data parallel to the inventory from earlier projects.
Representative Publications:
Clemens, L., Coon J., Graff P., López N., Morgan A., Mateo P., & Polinsky, M. (2012).
Experimental design for field linguistics, January 9, 2012. Symposium:
Psycholinguistic Research on Less‐Studied Languages. Portland, OR.
Dubinina, I. & Polinsky, M. (2012). Russian in the USA. In M. Moser (ed.) Slavic Languages
in Migration. Wien: University of Vienna.
in Migration. Wien: University of Vienna.
Montrul, S. & Polinsky, M. (2011). Why not heritage speakers? Linguistic Approaches to
Bilingualism 1 (1).
Plaster, K., Polinsky M., & Harizanov B. (In Press.) Noun Classes Grow on Trees: Noun
Classification in the North-East Caucasus. Language and representations
(tentative). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Polinsky, M. (2008a). Gender under incomplete acquisition: Heritage speakers’ knowledge
of noun categorization. Heritage Language Journal 6/1: 40-71.
Polinsky, M. (2008b). Without aspect. In G. Corbett & M. Noonan (eds.): Case and
grammatical relations. 263-282. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Polinsky, M. (2008c). Heritage language narratives. In D. Brinton, O. Kagan & S. Bauckus
(eds.): Heritage language education: A new field emerging. 149-164. New York:
Routledge.
Polinsky, M. (2009). What breaks in A- and A-bar chains under incomplete acquisition.
22nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. University of
22nd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. University of
California, Davis.
Polinsky, M. (2010). Asymmetries in nominal and verbal morphology. Second Language
Research Forum. University of Maryland.
Polinsky, M. (2011). Annotated bibliography of research in heritage languages. Oxford
Bibliographies, Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Polinsky, M. (2011). Reanalysis in adult heritage language: A case for attrition. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition. 45
Polinsky, M., Zhang B., & Gallo C. (2010). Eliciting heritage speakers' production,
October 3. MIMS. Hamburg, Germany: Hamburg University
October 3. MIMS. Hamburg, Germany: Hamburg University
Polinsky, M., Zhang B., & Gallo C. (2010). Heritage Chinese: A new view from production,
June 28, 2010. Fourth Heritage Language Institute, Manoa, HI: National Heritage
Language Resource Center
Viswanath, A. & Polinsky, M. (2012). A look at Heritage English. Formal Approaches to
Heritage Languages. Amherst, MA: UMass Amherst.
2. Linguistic Correlates of Proficiency: A Comparison of Heritage and Foreign Language Learners at the Intermediate to Advanced Levels
Project Director: Kira Gor (University of Maryland, College Park)
This project will collect data from heritage speakers of Russian closely matched in proficiency with L2 learners. Previous research during the pilot phase of the project has identified areas of differences between these two groups of learners, and a rigorous follow-up study is planned to demystify the similarities and differences between heritage and non-heritage learner profiles and developmental curves. Professor Gor will focus on determining linguistic barriers to proficiency at the Intermediate to Advanced Levels (ILR 1, 1+, and 2) for non-heritage learners. The results will be vital for curriculum planning, in particular for teaching mixed (heritage/non-heritage) classes.
3. Searchable Database of College-Level Heritage Language Classes/Programs in the U.S.
Project Leader: Maria Carreira (California State University, Long Beach)
The objective of this project is to create a searchable database of college-level heritage language programs across the U.S. To date, the database has collected information from over 100 institutions and 20 language programs across the country. We are adding to this information, analyzing it, and creating a typology of heritage language programs and instructional contexts, the goal being to identify the varying institutional conditions that correlate with having heritage-language-only classes as opposed to mixed classes (heritage and non-heritage students together).
The data for this project is being collected by a short online survey for college-level instructors of heritage language students, whether they teach in heritage-only classes or mixed classes (heritage and non-heritage students together). To complete the survey, click here.
4. Identifying Oral Proficiency Profiles of Heritage Speakers
Project Leader: Elvira Swender (ACTFL Professional Programs)
Each year thousands of heritage language speakers are given an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) for a variety of purposes. Because the OPI rating guidelines and scales (ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines or ILR Language Descriptors) were written for true second language learners, there is debate in the language testing community about their validity for assessing heritage language speakers (Valdés, 1989; Lowe, 1998; Kagan & Friedman, 2003). This project will gather data on the range and variety of linguistic profiles of Chinese and Hindi heritage speakers through oral proficiency testing and rating. In light of this data, the linguistic biographies of the test takers will be analyzed in order to gain an understanding of the linguistic, educational, and experiential factors that contribute to their speaking proficiency. This understanding will result in an expanded set of OPI descriptors that are needed to capture heritage speakers’ proficiency, enhance OPI tester training so that heritage speaker knowledge is taken into account, and inform instruction of heritage students. The results will also provide a corpus of data for curriculum development.
The goal of this site is to provide a central location for a collection of references, proficiency assessments, questionnaires, and research tools that may be utilized for assessing or conducting research on heritage speakers/learners' language skills.
*Information taken from http://nhlrc.ucla.edu
