This document discusses transnational identities and language teaching in a globalized world. It notes that greater mobility has led to transnational identities and stronger maintenance of heritage languages across generations. This presents both opportunities and challenges for language education. Heritage language learners have oral skills related to their home culture but may struggle with standard registers, grammar, or broader vocabularies. Effective teaching acknowledges learners' strengths while helping them expand their skills through content-rich, top-down approaches rather than focusing only on individual elements.

1. Transnational Identities
and Language Teaching
in the Globalized World
Susan C. Kresin
University of California, Los Angeles
Kresin@ad.ucla.edu

2. Transnational identities and language teaching
 Shifts in migration patterns (greater mobility)
 Transnational identities, maintaining strong links to the country of origin
 Greater language maintenance and intergenerational transfer
 Enhanced abilities of heritage students
 Need for adjustments to curriculum and methodology
 Opportunity to promote less commonly taught languages

3. Heritage language learners:
“Narrow” and “broad” definitions
 Learners in the “narrow” sense grow up hearing their
heritage language at home and have some bilingual
capabilities, especially oral skills on topics relating to
their home life (Valdés 2000).
 Other students are heritage learners in a broader, more
psychological sense: they may have little or no linguistic
ability, but they have a “heritage motivation”: they want
to “reconnect with their family’s heritage through
language” (Fishman 2001, van Deusen-Scholl 2003).

6. Community schools
 Česká škola bez hranic”

7. National Heritage Language Resource Center

9. Dissertations on heritage topics

10. Heritage speaker strengths
 Oral skills: listening, speaking
 Informal registers
 Home-based topics
 Cultural grounding,
especially in (early) childhood

11. Common heritage speaker weaknesses
in foreign language classes (1)
 Overuse of informal registers
 Overuse of “childlike” language forms
 Non-standard baseline language
 Archaic / generationally inappropriate language

12. Common heritage speaker weaknesses (2)
 Restricted lexicon
 Codeswitching, borrowing, calquing, extensions of meaning based on
dominant language
 Simplification and reanalysis of grammatical systems
 Influence of the dominant language on word order, use of pronouns and
possessive modifiers, gender, agreement and modal systems (Barski 2013,
Benmamoun, Montrul & Polinsky 2010, Laleko 2010, Polinsky 1995, 2006,
2008, Zemskaja & Glovinskaja 2001).
 Influence of informal language input: parataxis, lack of participles, gerunds,
relative clauses, and complex temporal and causal connectors
BUT heritage speakers may have well developed academic language
abilities in the dominant language, a foundation that can be tapped

13. Heritage learners’ goals
 1. Language maintenance
 2. Acquisition or development of a prestige language variety (the standard)
 3. Expansion of bilingual range (to a broader variety of topics and registers)
 4. Transfer of literacy skills
 5. Acquisition or development of academic skills in the heritage language
 6. Acquisition or development of cultural awareness
Beaudrie, Ducar & Potowski 2015: 59

14. “Bottom up” vs. “top down”
 “Bottom-up” approach: gradually develop individual skills, add new ones
incrementally (Krashen 1987)
Typical of foreign language instruction
 “Top-down” approach: starting at the level of the text
Builds on heritage language learners’ strengths, accelerates pace of learning
(Beaudrie, Ducar & Potowski 2015, Carreira & Kagan 2011, Kagan & Dillon
2001/2002, Chevalier 2004)