Heritage Language Program
The University of Illinois at Chicago offers a Spanish for Heritage Speakers program, which was founded in the late 1980s. Heritage speakers are students who have learned Spanish through their homes or through extended exposure in a Spanish-speaking country.
I began teaching in this program in 2000 and took over directing it in 2002. The initial Department-chosen textbook was El español escrito, which I changed circa 2003 to Nuevos mundos and then circa 2006 to Entre mundos. During this time, I had been writing the kind of materials that I wanted to use with our students, and the first edition of Conversaciones escritas was published in 2011. The second edition came out in 2017 and the third edition will be out in 2023.
The program has two levels, and while it began offering approximately 2-3 sections per level, it now has 12-15 sections per level, serving over 1,000 students per year. Around 70% of our students are the children of adult immigrants from Mexico; we also have students with familial origins in Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Peru, Guatemala, and other nations.
Our excellent, dedicated team of instructors are a mix of graduate students and lecturers from a variety of countries who routinely earn outstanding student evaluations and also participate in various forms of professional development, both receiving it (including this course) and also providing it to other instructors around the country.
The aim of our program is to build skills that enable students to critically analyze and challenge unjust conditions that affect Latinx communities using concise, effective language. We acknowledge and build on students’ competency in Spanish, strengthening their formal Spanish writing and oral expression. Some of the questions we explore include these:
What constitutes a fair and stable immigration policy?
What are the responsibilities of business corporations to society?
In what ways should gender and LGBTQ+ issues inform policy?
What exactly is “Spanglish” and why does it deserve respect?
In Fall 2022 our Department was thrilled to hire Dr. Angela Betancourt-Ciprian as the Heritage Language Program Director, after her excellent work during three years as its Interim Director. I remain as the program’s Faculty Advisor.