Education Innovation Rally 2025

Heritage speakers are increasingly common in Spanish classrooms around the U.S. After reviewing some common profiles of heritage speakers and how are they linguistically and affectively different from second language students, we will examine why it is important for us to center our instruction in language arts to the greatest extent that students’ proficiency allows. The goal is for our Spanish programs to center the needs of heritage speakers and lead to their personal, academic, and linguistic development in ways that support social justice. We will examine several textbook activities to see how they can best be supportive of students' language arts development