The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education provides the rapidly growing and globalizing field of heritage language (HL) education with a cohesive overview of HL programs and practices relating to language maintenance and development, setting the stage for future work in the field. Driving this effort is the belief that if research and pedagogical advances in the HL field are to have the greatest impact, HL programs need to become firmly rooted in educational systems. Against a background of cultural and linguistic diversity that characterizes the twenty-first century, the volume outlines key issues in the design and implementation of HL programs across a range of educational sectors, institutional settings, sociolinguistic conditions, and geographical locations, specifically: North and Latin America, Europe, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Cambodia. All levels of schooling are included as the teaching of the following languages are discussed: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian (Eastern and Western), Bengali, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Czech, French, Hindi-Urdu, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Pasifika languages, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Yiddish. These discussions contribute to the development and establishment of HL instructional paradigms through the experiences of "actors on the ground" as they respond to local conditions, instantiate current research and pedagogical findings, and seek solutions that are workable from an organizational standpoint. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students interested in heritage language education at home or abroad.
"This handbook sheds long overdue light on the status quo of major heritage languages mostly outside the U.S. It succeeds in presenting an important case to language educators, namely that they belong to a community and the more opportunities for dialogue that are created, such as this book, the better heritage education will be. This book also fulfills an important task - to indirectly argue that program development and teaching of heritage languages is an international field of research and policy making. This book is insightful not only for language educators but also for administrators, government officials and community leaders in both the U.S. and beyond."
Gabriela Nik. Ilieva, New York University, USA
Gabriela Nik. Ilieva, New York University, USA