ABSTRACT
Interest in heritage language acquisition has grown exponentially in recent years, and many aspects of the multi-faceted phenomenon have been investigated. The breadth and depth of research on heritage Spanish, the most widely spoken heritage language in the United States, is well represented in the current volume. Heritage language acquisition is a complex, socially embedded process, and as HL speakers increasingly enroll in formal classes in their heritage language, instructors must be equipped to provide high-quality instruction that helps students to achieve their goals, which, depending on the individual, may run the gamut from being able to communicate with extended family members to improving literacy skills and acquiring a second variety of the language for professional purposes. Excellent work is being done on the pedagogical front, where numerous books, chapters, and articles have been devoted to instructional techniques (Beaudrie, Ducar, & Potowski, 2014; Beaudrie & Fairclough, 2012; Fairclough & Beaudrie, 2016). Similarities and differences between HL and L2 learners’ linguistic knowledge, skills, and abilities have also been identified and described (e.g., Benmamoun, Montrul, & Polinsky, 2013; Montrul, 2012), and a handful of experimental studies, to be reviewed in this chapter, have been conducted to assess the learning gains made by Spanish heritage learners as a result of controlled instructional interventions on specific linguistic structures.
