Heritage Language 2 Consortium

A strategic partnership for the study of Portuguese in multilingual settings

Tag: UMass Amherst

HLAW 2022: Thank you, Lisbon, and see you in Amherst!

June 6, 2022 /

HLAW organizers and keynotes. From left to right: Professor Peter Austin (SOAS), Professor Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (Hamburg), Professor Jason Rothman (Tromsø), Professor Ana Lúcia Santos (HL2C, Lisbon), Professor Naomi Nagy (Toronto), Professor Cristina Flores (HL2C, Lisbon), Professor Luiz Amaral (HL2C, Amherst).

The Heritage Languages ​​Around the World (HLAW) conference took place between May 18-20, 2022, at the University of Lisbon, one of the HL2C founding institutions. The meeting was originally scheduled to take place in 2020 but had to be postponed due to the pandemic. But it was well worth the wait! HLAW 2022 was a joyful and uniting event that brought together leading scientists and students from linguistics, psychology and education to share novel research in the domain of heritage language research.

Many congratulations to the organizers, Ana Lúcia Santos, Cristina Flores, Hugo Cardoso and Luiz Amaral, for a wonderful event, and thank you to the Centro de Linguística  (CLUL, The University of Lisbon), Centro de Estudos Humanísticos (CEHUM, The University of Minho), the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Camões Institute, for supporting this important event.

The conference remains a regular event of the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), and we already look forward to the next edition of HLAW, to take place at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in June 2024!

The participants of HLAW 2022. Thank you to the organizers, keynotes and all those who attended to make this a special event. See you in Amherst for HLAW 2024!

 

International Conference on Heritage Languages Around the World in two weeks!

May 4, 2022 /

Only two weeks remain until the International Conference on Heritage Languages Around the World (HLAW), an exciting event taking place in person which brings together various research perspectives on heritage languages in order to contribute to a better understanding of the effects of language development and education in immigrant and minority language communities around the world.

Dates and location: 18th to 20th May 2022, University of Lisbon.

Organisers: HL2C members Ana Lúcia Santos (Lisbon), Cristina Flores (Minho), Luiz Amaral (UMass Amherst) and Hugo Cardoso (Lisbon) and by their respective institutions, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho, the Portuguese Program and the Heritage Language Research Group at UMass Amherst.

Programme: The programme is available here. The four keynote speakers are as follows

  • Peter Austin (University of London)
    Issues and challenges in language endangerment and heritage languages: some Australian examples
  • Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (University of Hamburg)
    At the interface of heritage language learning and teacher education: motorways, short-cuts and no-go areas
  • Naomi Nagy (University of Toronto)
    Promoting linguistic and cultural diversity through Heritage Language Sociolinguistics
  • Jason Rothman (University of Tromso)
    Theoretical Epistemology and Methodology in Heritage Language Bilingualism

 How to register: To register, please consider the payment information available on the website and fill in the form available here.

For more information, please see the HLAW website or contact heritage.languages.conference@gmail.com.

HL2C Seminar: Luiz Amaral (Amherst), Evaluating heritage speakers’ proficiency

October 12, 2021 /

We are delighted to kick off our HL2C Seminar Series for 2021-2022 on Thursday, September 30 from 3pm to 4pm GMT (Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London).

Presenters:

Luiz Amaral (UMass Amherst), Alexandre Alves dos Santos (UMass Amherst), Flávia Cunha (Mt. Holyoke College), Thaís de Sá (UFMG), and Ricardo de Souza (UFMG)

Title:

Evaluating Heritage Speakers’ Proficiency: Oral Proficiency Rubrics and a Vocabulary Test for Portuguese as a Heritage Language

How to join:

Our seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

Abstract:

Despite the increasing interest in heritage language (HL) acquisition and education, the area of HL assessment remains one of the least explored in the field. Several controversial issues seem to impact projects whose goals are to assess the language proficiency of HL speakers (HS). Some arise primarily from the reuse and/or adaptation of assessment tools originally created for L1 or L2 speakers (Kagan and Dillan, 2008; Draper and Hicks, 2000; Valdes, 1989). Others come from the perceived gap in the development of HL modalities, i.e., written proficiency might in some instances lag oral proficiency (Gatti and Grave, 2020). Some studies have explored and, in some cases, challenged these paradigms (Kagan and Friedman, 2003; Martin et.al., 2013), but there is still much to be done to understand the linguistic development of HS and to create the assessment tools needed by language programs.

With these needs in mind, our research group started a series of projects to study HL assessment looking into different language modalities and properties. In this presentation we describe two of our latest projects on (i) the creation of oral proficiency rubrics, and (ii) the development a computer-based vocabulary language test. The goal of the first effort is to compare two rubrics to evaluate oral production by HS. The first rubric is exclusively functional and evaluates how well participants performed each of the communicative tasks proposed. The second rubric in more comprehensive, including descriptors for vocabulary, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, and communicative competence. We used the two rubrics to assess the production of 20 HS that participated in an oral interview based on different everyday topics. We show the results obtained by using these two different sets of criteria and discuss the implications for each one. The second project is centered on the development of a computer-based VLT for Portuguese as L2 and HL – Teste de Verificação Lexical do Português Brasileiro (TVLPB). This project is a collaboration with colleagues from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. After explaining how the test was created, we compare the vocabulary test scores with the scores from the oral interview from the same group of participants cited above. This is a first attempt to validate the TVLPB and see how vocabulary measures compare to other types of language assessment tools in heritage populations.

HLAW Conference 2022

September 15, 2021 /

We are pleased to announce the International Conference on Heritage Languages Around the World (HLAW), which will take place at the University of Lisbon in May 2022. The conference is co-organized by Consortium members Ana Lúcia Santos (Lisbon), Cristina Flores (Minho), Luiz Amaral (UMass Amherst) and Hugo Cardoso (Lisbon) and by their respective institutions, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho, the Portuguese Program and the Heritage Language Research Group at UMass Amherst.

For more information, please visit the conference website.

 

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