ABSTRACT
The Heritage Language Research Priorities Conference Report addresses a pressing need for a research agenda for heritage languages. The report identifies seven areas as essential to heritage language education: the heritage speaker, the family, the community, a language-specific focus, policies, programs, and assessment. This chapter presents the case study that focuses on two of those research areas, the heritage speaker and the program, and explains a profile of the students enrolled in an intermediate course in Japanese for heritage speakers offered at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000 and 2001. The chapter analyses the results of language background and linguistic ability surveys of these learners, and an assessment of the curriculum’s effectiveness. One reason for the underdevelopment of Japanese literacy skills is likely to be the limited exposure to Japanese as an academic language, particularly for those who attended Japanese heritage schools or studied Japanese as a foreign language at the college level.
