By: Nick Santangelo

Did you know there's more than one type of bilingual speaker? Some bilingual are second language speakers, speaking only one language from youth and learning a second much later in life. Others are what's known as "heritage speakers," or those born into a family that speaks another country's language. Unsurprisingly, these heritage speakers have a leg up on other second language speakers when it comes to learning that second language—but they still need some help.

"The younger you are when you learn a second language, the more successful you are in acquiring that second language," said University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor Silvina Montrul during the closing talk of Friday's Language, Linguistics and Life Conference in the Student Center. "The older you are, the less successful you're going to be or the less native you're going to sound in the second language."

Put on annually by the Graduate Students of Language at Temple, the Language, Linguistics and Life Conference explored a number of issues relating to how language skills affect people's lives. Joining Dr. Montrul in the conference's closing keynote talk was University of Illinois, Chicago Professor Kim Potowski, who advocated for more education programs designed specifically for heritage language speakers.

"Teaching heritage speakers, that curriculum should look like a combination of language arts and language two types of support," Dr. Potowski told the audience.

Dr. Potowski was adamant that heritage speaker students should attend schools that teach them both English and their heritage language. She doesn't, however, think they should be taught the heritage language the same way non-heritage speakers should be. After all, students learning English as a second language don't take the same type of English literacy courses native speakers do. Why then, would anyone think heritage and non-heritage students should be taught the same way?

Heritage speakers need to be taught critical thinking skills so they learn to read and write information and debate points in their heritage language. Dr. Potowski insisted that these speakers don't learn everything they need to learn about a language in their homes. And why would anyone think they did? No American learns everything they need to learn about English simply by communicating with their family. Heritage speakers may start with a leg up over other bilingual people, but Dr. Potowski said they still have room to grow, just in different ways.

Dr. Montrul seemed to agree on this. She pointed out that many heritage speakers develop both languages in near equal proficiency as very young children, but they fail to continue developing the heritage language the same way they do English as they grow older. The reason is they don't get formal training on the heritage language in school. As a result, they end up with knowledge gaps and smaller vocabularies.

"Acquisition of a home language is not automatic, and it needs academic support," said Dr. Montrul. "Even after they were originally acquired, many structures can be lost or fail to develop further if there is no academic support for the language at school."

Playing off the now-canceled No Child Left Behind program, Dr. Potowski said she wanted to see "no child left monolingual." That may sound like quite the stretch goal, but she shared a practical idea that sprung from her research on how to keep heritage speakers bilingual. She wants to see more schools offering support for dual languages, which requires improvements to teacher preparation for dual language and heritage speakers. She also wants to see more research conducted in the form of longitudinal quantitative and qualitative studies of heritage speakers' heritage language writing development.

Dr. Montrul agreed that more research is necessary. She wants to use it to use it to better understand how heritage languages develop over the entire language learning period, which she defined as lasting from birth to age 21. Rhetorically, she asked how languages spoken and learned at school contribute to heritage language children's dual language development.

In her research to date, Dr. Montrul has found that "the type of input" heritage language students get is as important as the age at which they begin getting it. Further study could teach us more about languages, cognition, society, culture, bilingualism and language acquisition.

"The human language faculty is biologically programmed to learn more than one language," continued Dr. Montrul. "Bilingualism is natural and normal. There are many children that are exposed to two languages since birth and can be quite balanced in the two languages in early childhood. Language acquisition is not done by age three or five."

Achieving that balance is a challenge in the current educational climate. Dr. Potowski compared English in America to kudzu, an invasive species of plant that grows up and overtakes other plants and trees, stymieing their growth. That's not to say the professor wants to stop schools from teaching English. To the contrary, she presented research findings that showed it's possible for students to improve both their English and heritage language at the same time. But it's only possible if they're enrolled in schools that support dual languages.

And nurturing heritage languages is about more than protecting heritage. With 30 percent of heritage language students living in poverty and many of them living with the fear that their parents could be deported, Dr. Potowski sees support for heritage languages as a path to a more equitable society.

"I think dual language schools can contribute to social justice," said the University of Illinois, Chicago professor.

Underscoring this, Dr. Montrul told the story of how she earned her PhD in Montréal, where there was much more acceptance of individuals who spoke two languages. When she first came to work in academia in Albany, NY, Dr. Montrul saw how different things were in the United States. There was less tolerance for those who spoke a second language.

The answer to this problem, said Dr. Potowski, is getting more American kids proficiently speaking and writing second languages from a young age. Doing so will not only preserve heritage languages, but it could also potentially lessen Americans' prejudices toward those who speak one.