ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the scant existing research on Instructed Heritage Language Acquisition (IHLA). Heritage speaker: A person who is to some degree bilingual in a minority language and the majority language. Instruction aims to facilitate language learning by maximizing role of input and output in classroom. An important general question is whether heritage language (HL) instruction promotes HL development and maintenance more than naturalistic language exposure in home and/or community alone. Linguistically oriented research has uncovered many grammatical areas that are underdeveloped in HL grammars, such as inflectional morphology. The chapter suggests that teachers employ a variety of feedback types, including recasts and explicit corrections, and that they be alert to their students' responses to those feedback moves and willing to adapt their strategies as needed. It concludes by arguing that in order to move the field forward and for language instruction to be maximally effective for HL learners, systematic research on variety of language domains must be conducted.
