SALRC Sponsored Workshops

Symposium on Heritage Learning

Schedule | Workshop Home

SALRC sponsored a pre-conference symposium prior to the 25th meeting of the South Asian Language Analysis (SALA) roundtable, held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, between September 16-18, 2005.

Invited speakers presented papers on the theme of the symposium - Heritage Learners: Overcoming Curricular Challenges.

Objectives of the panel: Several times it has been a commonly agreed up fact that the theoretical, methodological, and curricular frameworks used to deliver Hindi are based on fossilized models unable to incorporate insights from contemporary research paradigms of foreign language acquisition. Teachers and researchers in the field of Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) also agree that the learning-audience has changed over a number of years, i.e., the target-learning communities have changed from largely foreign to largely heritage language communities, and the teaching materials used to teach such languages respond neither to the learner-needs nor to the contemporary contexts of learning situation. The main goal of language teaching is to embed language learning in the context of cultural learning, with the goal of teaching the language and its use in the native cultural context. Our discussion in the panel will highlight the challenges in meeting this goal in providing language instruction.

Schedule, reading materials and resources generated at the workshop can also be viewed at the UIUC website.