heritage languages, literacy, reading, writing, pedagogy

Irina A. Sekerina, College of Staten Island, City University of New York
Fatih Bayram, The Arctic University of Norway at Tromsø
Olga Parshina, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

Modern definition of literacy is understood more than just mastery of reading and writing skills. It is also a social and culturally determined construct as it entails ability to use these skills appropriately in socially relevant situations and within relevant registers. Literacy also involves familiarity with different genres as well as conventions that govern each genre, such as lexical, grammatical, pragmatic, and syntactic. A (fully) literate person is therefore expected to use proper language forms across a wide range of contexts.
Heritage speakers (HSs) vary tremendously when it comes to literacy in their heritage language (HL). While some are formally trained fluent readers and writers, others cannot read or write at all, especially when the HL uses an orthography (e.g., Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic) that differs from that of the societal language (e.g., English, German). Despite the dramatic increase in the number of HSs in the United States and Europe as well as the exponential growth in the number of HL studies in the last two decades, the research on the effect of literacy on the knowledge of HL is still underrepresented relative to investigation of more linguistic-internal aspects of HL competence and performance across different modalities (i.e., spoken vs written).
The proposed thematic section on literacy in HLs is based on 15 presentations in total, divided into 3 sessions with an interdisciplinary focus bringing together experts and studies from different disciplines such as experimental psycholinguistics (Session A), HL pedagogy (Session B), and writing development (Session C). Session A „Experimental Approaches” is composed of 5 presentations that use different experimental methodologies (e.g., eye-tracking, ERPs, cross-linguistic lexical tasks). The questions addressed vary from comprehension of passive to classifiers to anaphora, participants are either children or adults or both, and HLs are also diverse: Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian and Russian. Session B „Pedagogical Approaches” includes 6 presentations that address various factors in HL pedagogy: formal teaching of HL writing in the college classroom, the impact of dual immersion classroom in secondary school, policies concerning developing literacy in HLs, the effects of literacy in the societal language on that in the HL, and the facilitatory effect of literacy in HL on people’s identity. Finally, Session C „Spelling and Orthography” consists of 4 presentations all of which investigate written corpora of texts and essays produced by HSs and L2 learners. The focus is on the kinds of specific errors HSs make in their writing and what accounts for these errors. Together the participants will discuss approaches to literacy and untangling its effects on HLs and will serve as a new collaborative forum that will allow presenters and audience interested in this complex interdisciplinary area of research to connect with each other in a live discussion.
The two leaders for the proposed thematic section are an established scholar (Irina Sekerina) and a rising young researcher (Fatih Bayram) in the area of heritage languages whose interests encompass literacy in HLs. Two of the proposed presentations are by the two leaders whose biographical sketches follow this abstract.

Presentations: