In December, the Greater Princeton Branch of AYLUS (GPA) collaborated with many other branches for the newest edition of newspapers to promote youth volunteerism. Editors across the country worked together to have this newsletter published on a monthly basis. Besides the AYLUS announcement, the two-page newsletter covers unique volunteering activities at nationwide branches. We expect this monthly newsletter to help improve communication among AYLUS members nationwide and advocate for the concept of community service wherever it applies.
Editor-in-Chief: Lana Cheng (12/1, 3 hrs; 12/10, 3 hrs; 12/13, 3 hrs)
Advisor: Cassie Wang (12/1, 3 hrs; 12/10, 3 hrs; 12/14, 3 hrs)
Deputy Editor-in-Chief: Catherine Feng (Art: 12/13, 3 hrs), Kathie Wang (12/6, 3 hrs), Brenna Li (12/6, 3 hrs)
Art Editors: Daniel Feng (12/12, 2 hrs), Danica Xiong (12/12, 2 hrs)
Article Editors (12/1, 2 hrs for all): Alyssa Jin, Amy Wu, Brigitte Shi, Catherine Harman, Claire Tang, Emma Liu, Gina Shen, Jerry Chen, Luna Chen, Megan Wang, Meiqi Tan, Parker Liu, Sophie Liu, Tom Purui Cui.
AYLUS Times Advisor & National Honorary President Cassie Wang (12/4, 3 hrs; 12/12, 3 hrs; https://illo2023.columbiaspectator.com/) continues volunteering at the Columbia Daily Spectator as the Senior Illustration Editor.
Life behind language: How heritage impacts language learning
By Cassie Wang / Senior Staff Illustrator
With over 150 countries represented at Columbia, it is no surprise that the University must meet a vast array of language needs. For children of immigrants, learning their native language can mean a greater cultural connection. In this episode, reporter Sophia Cordoba speaks with professors and students alike to understand what it means to live and learn as a heritage speaker.
Transcript:
[Sophia Cordoba]: How would you say “straw” in Spanish? If you ask me, I would answer “pitillo,” with confidence. Yet in 90 percent of Spanish-speaking countries, I would be wrong. A Bolivian might say “bombilla,” in Mexico you’d hear “popote,” and a Peruvian would tell you its “cañita.” That’s not to mention the Spaniards, who would argue that “pajita” is the way to go.
Depending on their different upbringings, you’ll find that no two Spanish speakers are the same. In fact, everyone at Columbia brings forth a unique interpretation of language, with their own slang, accents, and cultural contexts. So how can we approach language learning when our backgrounds and goals are so different?
My name is Sophia Cordoba, and you’re listening to The Ear, Spectator’s podcast dedicated to documenting and investigating Columbia’s past and present. Today, I’ll be unpacking what it means to be a heritage speaker at Columbia, and how the language courses offered here can open a door to stronger cultural connections for students of all backgrounds.
Part 1: To Teach a Heritage Speaker
It is no secret that Columbia is home to an incredibly diverse community. Advertisements and administrators alike proudly assert that Columbia is a “center of learning” for scholars, staff, and students from over 150 countries. One need look no further than the class of 2027, which consists of students from 86 countries and countless other unquantified ethnic and linguistic backgrounds.
In order to meet the interests and needs of this diverse community, Columbia offers a selection of over 50 language courses each semester, among the highest of any U.S. university.
However, for many, language learning is not as straightforward as simply completing the language courses necessitated by the Core Curriculum. Some students are approaching language from an informal background, having been exposed to it throughout their childhood for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they moved between countries, grew up in an ethnic enclave, or simply heard it from their parents. The bottom line is: they’re familiar, but have never actually studied the language in a classroom. We refer to these students as “heritage speakers,” as opposed to “second language learners.”
Professor Francisca Aguilo Mora, a lecturer in Spanish in Columbia’s department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, explains how this type of background affects the language acquisition process.
[Francisca Aguilo Mora]: A second language learner is like—I always use this metaphor—it’s a blank paper in which you as a professor or textbooks or curriculums, you start saying, “Okay, let’s start with the beginning.” With the present—and the curriculums are designed pretty much in tenses—present, past, future, then the conditional, and the terrible subjunctive, right? What happens with heritage learners is that we can have a student that gives you a very sophisticated, let’s say, subjunctive sentence without even knowing that it is that, but then not knowing how to use the present, let’s say. And we have so many differences that instruction needs to be very differentiated. And it’s not so easy to start from this beginning to that end, as we imagine for other learners. And a second very important thread is that second language learners have an initial visual contact with the language, right? Because they didn’t hear it at home or in their communities. Normally what happens is that the first time they have contact with language, they have it visually through textbooks, through classes, through the academic setting. For heritage speakers, that normally doesn’t happen; the first contact is totally aural. So their needs are different.
[Cordoba]: As Aguilo Mora made clear, heritage speakers have incredibly distinct needs when it comes to language learning. Their skillset simply does not translate well to a standard second language learning track. Despite this, heritage speaker courses have not been around for very long.
The first wave of interest occurred in the 1970s, driven by Spanish teachers in the United States. However, by 2002, only about 17.8 percent of universities offered heritage courses for Spanish speakers. By 2012, there was a 22.2 percent increase in courses offered—a number that is not insignificant, but also one that did not keep up with the pace of growing immigrant populations in the United States. It was in this environment of increasing interest and need that several professors at Columbia developed heritage programming for students.
Professor Alla Smyslova, senior lecturer in the Slavic languages department, designed a Russian heritage speaker course in 2002. Professor Rakesh Ranjan, senior lecturer and language coordinator in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies, whom we will hear from later, developed the first Hindi-Urdu program in 2008. And while Columbia had been offering a class called “Spanish for Native Speakers” for a number of years, it wasn’t until last semester that Columbia and Barnard created a complete track for heritage speakers.
Aguilo Mora and Barnard Spanish professor Antoni Fernandez Parera were both invited by the University to help develop this new program. They arrived with research expertise in second language acquisition and exposure to the University of Miami’s long-standing Spanish heritage track. I spoke to them about how they approached developing the track here at Columbia.
[Aguilo Mora]: So what happened is that heritage speakers were normally—since they didn’t have the space, we had them in the second language classes. And what happens is, that is not a space for them pedagogically speaking. Some students can just be everywhere, they can navigate everywhere, but for most of them, they were not reaching their full potential.
The second language learner knows the grammar technicalities, right? Knows how to spell, okay, but then has a lot of trouble in communicating sometimes, or listening comprehension. The heritage learner—and there are so many different profiles—they have a lot of trouble in spelling, because they know some words are pronounced the same way, so they are not sure if it’s an S or a C. They have spelling things, they have registers. I mean, we embrace what they bring into the classroom, but we expand the registers because they bring a more casual oral register and what we want is to empower them so that they can function also in formal academic settings. So it’s like, let’s embrace what you have, let’s make you aware that your bilingualism is amazing, right? That your pronunciation sounds like native although you don’t speak full sentences in Spanish. But let’s work on expanding that and expanding registers and reading, for example, discourse, etcetera.
[Cordoba]: In order to identify and account for all these differences, heritage speaker classes often have a two-step placement process: an online exam and a written exam. This is particularly necessary in language tracks with wide regional variations, such as Hindi-Urdu, as Ranjan explains.
[ Rakesh Ranjan]: When you see a heritage learner for Hindi, we divide them into three different categories. First is ancestral heritage learners. What does it mean? For Hindi learners, their parents speak Hindi, and so they have some exposure of Hindi, but informal. Then—we call it cognate heritage learners. Cognate heritage learners, Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language and 16 Indo-Aryan languages are recognized as official languages in India. So, you must have Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, Punjabi, all these languages, so their parents, they speak not Hindi, but other Indo-Aryan languages. And then the third category is non-cognate Indo-Aryan languages, like people coming from South India, they speak Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam.
We meet with them separately sometimes in the beginning so that the class becomes kind of normal, or the pace becomes the same pace of learning. We have to see that this heritage learner group is very heterogeneous. We have to identify the different groups and accordingly develop some strategy to make it smooth.
[Cordoba]: In general, heritage speaker courses require a lot of individualized instructions, far beyond the average language course, a fact that is both a point of pride and pain for professors.
[Fernandez Parera]: This is not a course, like a generic course, like second language learners that you can buy at a bookstore. This is something, it’s like artisan work, you know. So you do it, and you improve it, and you see the needs of students.
[Aguilo Mora]: Which is a lot of work.
[Fernandez Parera]: It is a lot of work.
[Aguilo Mora]: Yeah. If you are a professor and you don’t want to work, don’t do that.
[Cordoba]: In order to provide these “artisan” courses, heritage speaker courses are characterized by projects as opposed to textbook material. Students are encouraged to engage with the city. In the case of Spanish speakers, this can be through visiting the Museo del Barrio or the Hispanic Society of America. Heritage speaker courses are also more interactive in the sense that students can bring much of their own knowledge into the classroom, sharing their culture with professors and students alike. Thus, students can celebrate their distinct backgrounds and draw connections between experiences.
[Fernadez Parera]: For example, the final project is “historias de inmigracion,” immigration stories. It’s so that they know their past better, they have to interview someone. So it lets them express themselves in Spanish, what they found in their investigation, in their research.
[Aguilo Mora]: We do critical analysis of literature of their choice, Latin American literature, or Latinx literature. And then they create literature, let’s say a poem, a performance, a theater piece or whatever, and they analyze their own creation in class. And it’s amazing how they connect without really something that we require. But the different identity issues or concerns or interests, right? So they create those spaces in which they choose what they want to invest their research on and they create entire spaces in which—without us telling them, “You need to really talk about yourself”—a lot of people feel the need of expressing.
[Cordoba]: Ranjan paired similar interactive approaches with a recent project he created, called STARTALK Hindi Audio-Visual Module Project. He showed me a website full of videos capturing scenes from Indian life, from the classroom to the kitchen to heritage sites. Within these videos, native speakers are interviewed, connecting culture with vocabulary. Ranjan explained how just the week before, a video detailing Durga Puja, a Hindu festival, became a launching point for students to share their own experiences and advance their language skills.
[Ranjan]: I showed them this and then I tell them that you are going to present whatever you like based on these modules or your own experience, bring your own experience. When we were growing up in our community, was there Durga Puja? What was happening there?
[Cordoba]: These conversations made it clear that by getting a read on regional varieties and student experiences, students can learn to look beyond the “standard” version of their language that may be found in textbooks. For those who may be used to only hearing Spanish from Madrid or French from Paris, heritage courses can become a space to widen their perspectives through conversations with their peers.
[Aguilo Mora]: We not only embrace all the regional varieties, but I think I would say we focus on all varieties that are especially from Latin America, right? We work also a lot on deconstructing prejudices against, “This variety is better than the other,” right? We work, especially in intermediate level, we work a lot on that. Also, we do a lot of sociolinguistic teaching, even to show them, this is what you’re saying is not wrong. But the standard resembles more this dialect because of this social-historical, whatever. So we work a lot on that, because they need to realize that, again, what they bring into the classroom is not wrong. That’s very much valued and is super important.
[Cordoba]: Part 2: To Learn as a Heritage Speaker
Just as the aforementioned professors gave students a chance to bring their own experiences to class, it’s time for us to hear from student heritage speakers. First, I spoke with Celeste Abourjeili, a senior at the School of General Studies who is taking Arabic for Heritage Speakers I.
[Celeste Abourjeili]: Growing up, my parents spoke to me in a mix of languages, and Arabic was one of them. And they speak mostly to each other in Arabic. So whenever I go to my native country and see my family, I usually am exposed or have been exposed to Arabic. But I never really spoke the language. I just understood it, but was unable to speak.
[Cordoba]: While Abourjeili had tried taking a couple of years of Arabic at Sciences Po Paris, she decided to start fresh with Columbia’s heritage speaker track. I asked her what this experience was like.
[Abourjeili]: I think because I’ve done a bit of Arabic before, I actually kind of know a lot of the stuff we’re going through. So this kind of reinforces that and slows it down so that everything I was confused about previously is all coming together now.
[Cordoba]: The feeling of language finally coming together is not unique to Abourjeili. I heard similar thoughts from Hannah Poeng, a senior at Yale University who is currently learning two of her Cambodian heritage languages: Teochew and Khmer. She is learning the latter through the Shared Course Initiative, a partnership between Columbia, Cornell University, and Yale University that connects students who speak more obscure languages with the right professors to teach them. She explained to me how the class structure allowed for effective language acquisition.
[Hannah Peong]: Curriculum-wise and like learning-wise, we can give feedback to the teacher whenever since it’s such a small class, but because most of us are beginners, we either haven’t been exposed to the language, all of us, with exception of one person has a heritage tie to the language. Except most of the class didn’t grow up hearing or like listening to the language. So we all started from the very, very beginning. We took it pretty slow. We spent like three weeks on the first lesson, and then we asked the teacher if we could speed it up a little more.
So now it’s like a week per lesson, which is a pretty good pace to keep up.
[Cordoba]: Despite the virtual format for the Shared Course, the class still managed to forge a close connection through cultural ties and a brief sponsored meet-up of Cambodian students hosted at Cornell University this past October. Peong explained to me how sharing a space with fellow heritage speakers allowed her to bond over language nuances.
[Poeng]: I feel like there’s a unique experience to having a Cambodian parent. Like certain things you hear when your parents are going, “Ugh this kid.” The way they say it is so culturally specific at times. So I once called up my mom because me and my classmates were all sitting at lunch in Cornell. I was like, “Mom, when you’re insulting me, what do you say again?” And then my mom sent an audio message, she’s like, “Why do you need this?” And I was like, no reason. Then I played it for the table and everyone was like, “Yeah, that’s what my mom says too!” We were all—we weren’t trauma bonding, but we were bonding.
[Cordoba]: The community formed by class not only provides a comfortable space for students, but also a more engaging class structure.
[Poeng]: We’re in a food unit. So every once in a while, we learn the name of food, and then someone in the class will go, “Oh, like, I’ve heard of this food,” and she’s like, “Have you? Does your mom cook this?” And then she asked us questions about that. Right before we started our trip to Cornell, my Yale classmate and my Columbia classmate were in my apartment, and my parents were also here. So my mom was cooking food for them, so the entire time my Columbia classmate was praising my mom’s cooking, and then my teacher decided to take it upon herself to interrogate me on my mom’s cooking.
[Cordoba]: Perhaps most importantly, Poeng’s Khmer course has given her a connection back to her culture and home.
[Poeng]: For the longest time, my mom wasn’t able to help me with my homework because she doesn’t know a lot of English. She also doesn’t really know a lot of math and grammar things. So school wasn’t really a thing I could go to my parents for, but my mom can read Khmer. So I would call my mom right before every class and be like, “Hey, mom, like can you help me go through this homework?’ Or go through this textbook?” Or “Can you help me check my homework?” which is never a thing I was able to do, so this was a very crazy experience. And also a very nice bonding thing. So this is probably the most I’ve ever called my mom in college.
[Cordoba]: So what is a straw in Spanish? A heritage class tells us that it is pitillo … and bombilla and popote and pajita. The beauty of language acquisition based on embracing different backgrounds is not in deciding one word, but in learning all of the options.
Personalized instruction by professors and interactions with students who hold shared experiences allow students to connect with new communities on campus and beyond. Through teaching how to communicate both in academic settings and in simple calls to home, heritage speaker courses can offer a unique resource for students to reach their full linguistic potential.
Thank you for listening to The Ear. This episode was produced by Julia Hay and reported on by me, Sophia Cordoba. The original music in this episode was composed by Obi Okoli. Follow us on Instagram at @SpectatorPodcasts and subscribe to The Ear on Spotify to get notified when we release new episodes. You can also find old episodes with full transcripts at columbiaspectator.com/podcasts.
Credits:
• Edited by Claire Schnatterbeck
• Produced by Julia Hay
• Music by Obi Okoli
• Illustration by Cassie Wang
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