Towards a National Strategy for Capacity-building in Heritage Languages and Spanish: A Response to America's Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century

The year 2017 saw the publication of one of the strongest endorsements of language education on record: America's Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century (henceforth America's Languages). Commissioned by a bipartisan group of members of Congress and authored by the Commission on Language Learning of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, this report advocates for building foreign language capacity and outlines a national strategy for expanding language education so as to "improve access to as many languages as possible for people of every region, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background" (viii). At a time when foreign language enrollments are down, foreign languages are being devalued, and federal funding is uncertain, this ringing endorsement of language learning by one of the nations' oldest and most respected learned societies could not have made a more opportune arrival.

America's Languages details both the substantial benefits of language learning as well the serious consequences of the nation's persistent foreign language deficit. Putting language education on par with English and math education, this report makes a persuasive case for languages to prospective students, parents, school administrators, policy makers, and publishers of educational materials. In terms of an investment strategy for the twenty-first century, it recommends building capacity in five areas: 1) teacher training; 2) public-private educational partnerships; 3) heritage languages; 4) Native American languages; and 5) study abroad.

The Commission's findings and recommendations find support in a wide range of publications on the state of language education. Heritage languages (HLs), in particular, have been a longstanding fixture of such publications, including a 2002 ERIC Digest by Ingrid Pufahl Nancy Rhodes, and Donna Christian, which examined successful capacity-building practices in other countries, a 2007 report by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages on the changing structure of language education, a 2012 report by the US Senate identifying the language needs of the Federal Government (Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia), and ACTFL's 2017 Lead with Languages, a campaign to make language learning a national priority.

Though produced at different times, by different authors, and for different audiences, these reports as well as America's Languages make similar points about HLs, namely, that: 1) the United States has a pressing need for multilingual individuals; 2) HL learners can help fill that need by building on their home-based bilingualism and biculturalism through formal instruction and community-based initiatives; and 3) educational settings should provide more language learning opportunities for HL learners.

Originally drafted to make the case for HL education when the field was first establishing itself, these points hark back to a 1998 position paper by Richard Brecht and Catherine Ingold that was published in connection with the launch of the Heritage Language Initiative by the National Foreign Language Center and the Center for Applied Linguistics. The study and teaching of HLs, however, predates this initiative and has its roots in Spanish as a heritage language (SHL), particularly in the work of Guadalupe Valdés starting in the 1970s (Carreira 2012).

The Current State of HL Education

Much has happened in the twenty years since the publication of Brecht and Ingold's (1998) seminal paper. Linguistic research has greatly expanded our understanding of HL grammars and the factors behind language maintenance and loss, both in individuals and society. Informed by this research, a signature HL pedagogy has come into existence focused on expanding HL learners' functional skills and linguistic repertoires, attending to their aspirations and relational needs, targeting vulnerable aspects of linguistic knowledge, and attending to issues of diversity through differentiated instruction (e.g., Carreira 2016; Carreira and Hitchins Chik, in press; Carreira, Hitchins Chik, and Kagan 2017).

With these foundations in place, the field of HL education is now positioned for the next stage of development: institutionalization. Ekholm and Trier (1987) define institutionalization as "a process through which an organization assimilates an innovation into...