Heritage Language Development: Exhortation or Good Stories?
Lao, C. and Krashen, S. 2008. Heritage language development: Exhortation or good stories? International Journal of Foreign Language Teaching 4 (2): 17-18.
Despite the well-researched advantages, not all young people are interested in continuing to develop their heritage language. Their apathy may be due to "ethnic avoidence," a preference for the new culture over the old (Tse, 1988), and/or it may be due to teasing by more advanced speakers in reaction to the young person's imperfect attempts to speak the language (Krashen, 1998). These barriers, plus a lack of input, have been hypothesized to be the cause of low heritage language proficiency.
We present here a case in which interest in the heritage language was stimulated in a 12-year-old boy, Daniel, who came to the United States at age eight from China. Daniel's Mandarin proficiency was clearly declining, despite his parents' efforts: They sent Daniel to a Chinese heritage language school for three hours each Saturday. Moreover, it was clear that Daniel was not interested in Mandarin.
Daniel was recently enrolled in a 4-week summer Mandarin program in San Francisco aimed at foreign language students of Mandarin who had had several years of Mandarin instruction in school and