Mission statement

Welcome to the Heritage Language Cooperative at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a multidisciplinary initiative currently housed in the Department of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. We are a group of faculty members, graduate students, teachers, and community members in the Chicago area who seek to increase knowledge about heritage languages in the United States and continually explore how to most effectively teach languages to heritage speakers (What is a heritage speaker?).

The two primary missions of the Heritage Language Cooperative are:

Research
Teacher Development

Research

Members of the Cooperative conduct original research on heritage language communities in the Chicago area, which is the third most linguistically diverse city in the United States:

Research projects work within a number of theoretical perspective and currently include:

* Creating online corpora of digital recordings of speakers for free public access to researchers.
* Analyzing the linguistic structure of heritage languages.
* Assessing heritage language schooling opportunities.
* Investigating the effectiveness of specific instructional inventions.

Click on Current Projects to learn more.

Teacher Development

The Heritage Language Cooperative seeks to become a primary resource for teachers of heritage languages in Chicago and the Midwest. Our website offers free access to research articles, curricular units and materials, publications about effective pedagogical approaches in teaching heritage languages, and links to external resources. We also plan to continue offering professional development to school districts. A sample of institutions we have worked with appears below.

Austin Community College, Austin, TX. September 2008. University of Salamanca, Spain. March 2007.
Western Illinois University, Moline, IL. March 2008. York High School, Elmhurst, IL. January 2007.
University of North Carolina-Wilmington, February 2008. Cervantes Institute, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. March 2007.
Monmouth College, Galesburg IL, September 2007. DePaul University, Chicago, IL. February 2006.
Illinois State University, Bloomington, IL. February 2006. ASPIRA High School, Chicago, IL. Spring 2004.

For any questions, or to learn about how you can join in our efforts to document and promote heritage languages, please contact the director, Dr. Kim Potowski, at kimpotow@uic.edu.