ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses many university-level foreign language programs in the United States offer separate tracks for heritage language (HL) and Non-heritage language (non-HL) learners mostly at the beginning and intermediate levels. A number of postsecondary foreign language programs in the United States provide separate tracks for HL versus non-HL learners as a pedagogically sound strategy. One uninvestigated issue concerning the separate-track policy is that systems are primarily implemented at the beginning and/or intermediate levels, but not at the advanced level. For students in advanced-level Japanese language classes who are required to comprehend authentic Japanese texts, the ability to recover zero pronouns is necessary for the efficient and accurate comprehension of Japanese texts. The chapter investigates how similarly and differently Japanese heritage language (JHL) learners and non-JHL learners monitor and recover phonologically empty Japanese pronouns, in order to establish intersentential reference when reading an advanced level Japanese narrative text for meaning.
