ABSTRACT
York University, located in the city of Toronto (Ontario), is one of the largest public postsecondary educational institutions in Canada. The university counts 53,000 undergraduate and graduate students, including 5,462 international students from 157 countries (York University, n.d.a), and prides itself for its “cross-discipline programming, innovative course design, diverse experiential learning and a supportive community environment” (York University, n.d.b). The Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics at York University is housed within the university’s large Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies. In terms of heritage language (HL) teaching, HL streams in a number of language programs have gone through processes of initiation, implementation, and institutionalization, i.e., have been proposed, had initial steps or sub-processes implemented, and subsequently become a stable, well-established part of the department (Ekholm & Trier, 1987, p. 13). The department has also witnessed the closure of HL streams that have failed to become long-lived. Currently, the Arabic, Korean, and Spanish programs 1 offer separate streams for heritage language learners (HLLs) in some or all of the introductory, intermediate, and advanced language levels. The German, Greek, Japanese, Russian, Swahili, and Yiddish programs teach HLLs and second-language learners (L2Ls) in mixed classrooms. Some of these and other language programs, for various academic, pedagogical, and administrative reasons, never opted for the heritage stream or let go of it in the initiation phase. They instead accommodate the needs of a diversity of different student learners in one classroom. 2 Others, whose heritage streams had already been well established, decided to close them down due to administrative challenges. This applies to Chinese, Italian, and Portuguese. Language planners in the department have in the process engaged in scholarly debates revolving around different aspects of HL acquisition and bilingual learning, as well as institutional and administrative challenges associated with the implementation of alternate streams. This chapter draws from experiences of teaching Hindi-Urdu to primarily, but not exclusively, HLLs at three levels. After one decade of teaching HLLs and L2Ls in mixed classrooms, in 2015–16, the recently launched Hindi-Urdu HL stream is moving from the implementation to the institutionalization phase. The development of this stream will be reflected upon in this chapter.
