Teaching situation...


The majority of people (26 of 43) responding to this question teach only regular high school or college language courses. Some noted, however, that some of the students enrolled in their regular classes are older than average or younger than average (i.e., high school students enrolled in college courses); most of these are people from the community who have a heritage interest in the language. Three others mentioned that they teach college language courses for special purposes, such as business or technical language. One of the high school teachers who participated in the survey supervises independent study courses for high school students, many of whom are "at risk".

Two survey participants who are Chinese teachers said that they have instituted, as a regular part of their language curricula, courses or course tracks specially tailored to heritage students. These students often have high oral/aural proficiency (sometimes in non-Mandarin dialects) but no functional written language proficiency, and after taking these courses students are ready for integration into the more advanced (traditional) courses.

Other types of language instruction in which survey participants are involved include:

  • Involvement with a correspondence course in Hebrew through University extension
  • Teaching Urdu on a voluntary basis to high-school students
  • Private tutoring in Swedish to older people with Swedish background and family
  • Designing, organizing and teaching "non-academic" Persian courses for business people, government linguists and university students who want to improve their skills (e.g., an intensive, 5-week summer course in intermediate Persian)
  • Occasional community ed classes in Dutch
  • Supervising "on -demand" supervised tutorials in African languages
  • Organizing after school/summer programs for elementary, middle and high school students in Swahili, and training teachers of Swahili for summer programs at neighborhood houses
  • Teaching Arabic at a NEH Institute on "Islam in West Africa" in Arkansas
  • The self-access materials for Micronesian languages developed at the University of Oregon are available to anyone who requests them.
  • The Irish classes taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are taught by someone with a university affiliation, but the classes themselves are not offered through the university. Almost all of the students are from the community and are 30-40 years of age. In fact, traditional students often sign up for the class but then drop out when their "real classes" get too demanding.
  • Temple University works with heritage learners of Greek in conjunction with the Hellenic School of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral.

Future plans for other (non-traditional) involvement include:

  • Distance education for Yoruba is anticipated upon the completion of a CD-ROM text.
  • Offering distance education in Japanese at the advanced level to supplement elementary and intermediate courses offered at other state institutions and to make specially-tailored courses available to the community.