One of the characteristics of heritage language teaching is the students‘ heterogeneity and the fact that many of them experience considerable difficulty with the more demanding literacy aspects of their first language. The challenges for writing in the heritage language that arise from this are reflected in the following observations.
a) Introduction to the writing system of the first language
The students who learned the alphabet in the immigration country instead of their country of origin, must first be carefully introduced to the phonemes and graphemes of their first language. For the languages that are based on the Latin writing system, this involves primarily those letters that do not exist in their school language (e. g. ë, ç, ı). Thus, many teachers only introduce these letters at the end of the first or the beginning of the second grade, in order to avoid confusing the children who are learning the alphabet in their school language. With non-Latin based alphabets there is less danger of confusion with the local language; however, the entire alphabet must be learned in the first language.
b) Acquiring and expanding a differentiated vocabulary in the first language
Many of the migrant students have considerable vocabulary gaps in their first language. Moreover, their vocabulary and language skills consist of expressing family-related themes in dialect. For everything else – in particular school-related situations or more challenging topics – they use the school language or the language of the country in which they reside. Thus, the vocabulary of these children and adolescents is divided into two parts, which runs counter to the efforts of developing comprehensive bilingual competences. Therefore, an important goal of heritage language teaching must be the development and build-up of a differentiated vocabulary which also includes standard language forms. A distinction should be made between the vocabulary which the students should actively master (active or productive vocabulary) and therefore must practice intensively. This should include, most of all, commonly used words, as well as words which the students have to understand but not necessarily use themselves (receptive or understanding vocabulary). The importance of vocabulary building exercises is underscored in the wealth of suggestions and exercises provided in chapters 14 and 15 of this manual.
c) Introduction (guide) to the standard language
In addition to a limited vocabulary, another charac-teristic of many migrant students is that their mastery of the first language is (almost) always limited to a dialectal variant and that they lack a command of its written language or standard form. One of the tasks of heritage language teaching, therefore, is a careful introduction of the standard language, the command of which is a prerequisite and the key to the written language and students‘ ability to write correctly. The important principles for this introduction (which begins in the first school year) comprise:
- 1) Careful teaching: the children‘s enjoyment of writing is the priority goal and must not be compromised by excessive norm orientation.
- 2) A comparative and exploratory approach: instead of a purely normative approach to teaching, the differences between standard language and dialect should, whenever possible, be mediated by an approach that favors student discovery and comparative learning.
- 3) Many appropriate practice opportunities: students‘ acquired vocabulary and language skills in the standard language must be practiced repeatedly and with appropriate writing tasks until they are fully internalized.
d) Scaffolding: providing support structures “scaffolds” for linguistically weaker students
The school language used in the classroom is more complex in terms of vocabulary and formal structures than everyday language. Acquiring this “classroom language” and, connected with it, textual competence (the competence of interacting with a written text, both productively or receptively) is a daunting task. A currently used, successful approach to support students in German classes and German as a second language classrooms is the aformentioned scaffolding method. This approach is also ideally suited for teaching heritage languages. Students receive supportive scaffolding for certain aspects (e. g., vocabulary, sentence construction, textual structure) in form of a sample or a structure which they can use for orientation. For instance, this could be in form of an outline as in the “Eleven-poems” (see # 21.1), which can be filled in with the students‘ own words. Another example is providing building blocks or elements for certain parts of a text (e. g. beginnings of sentences of appropriate verbs for a picture story) which the students may use to write their own texts. Specific steps for a simple text can also be provided (e. g. a recipe or an instruction) for how to accomplish a particular task. In all of these instances, the use of the “scaffold” to accomplish parts of the language task (e. g. text building) helps to reduce the burden on the students in the creation of a text. In adopting and applying correct examples of words and phrases, they are actively broadening their language repertoire. Many of the teaching suggestions, particularly in Part III (Suggestions for promoting particular aspects of writing), present simple variations of scaffolding (see 14.1: word fields, 15.2: alternative word test, 16.3: parallel texts).
For further information about scaffolding, see among others https://www.uni-due.de/imperia/md/ content/prodaz/scaffolding.pdf
e) Observations about orthography
Since grammatical and spelling rules and problems are at least partially language-specific, they will not be addressed in detail in this publication. Nevertheless, the following should be observed as a general principle for effective grammar training:
- 1) Basic vocabulary orientation: the acquisition of a grammatically correct vocabulary as well as the correction of mistakes should be oriented towards frequently used vocabulary. The more often a word is used, the more important is knowing and applying its correct spelling.
- 2) Selective correction: marking all mistakes leads primarily to discouragement. It is more useful to point out the three to five most important types of mistakes or individual errors and to plan an effective, multi-stage training to correct them.
- 3) Useful improvements, long-term training: the traditional method of repeatedly re-writing an incorrectly spelled word is of no benefit in terms of educational psychology. Useful and effective training leads to improvement if the words in question are practiced in various different sequences over a period of 2–3 weeks.
- 4) Help with self-help: a thorough introduction to the usage and handling of dictionaries is a prerequisite for students‘ ability to effectively avail themselves of these tools.