Heritage Languages in America: Building on our National Resources

Friday, October 18, 2002

The Second National Conference on Heritage Languages in America will be held October 18-20, 2002, at the Sheraton Premiere Hotel in Tysons Corner, Virginia, close to Washington, DC. The conference is being organized by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), with support from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Building from the foundation of the First National Conference, convened in October, 1999, in Long Beach, California, the Second National Conference will seek to further the aims of the Heritage Languages Initiative, a national effort to develop the non-English language resources that exist in our communities. It will bring together heritage language community and school leaders, representatives from pre-K-12 schools and colleges and universities, world-renowned researchers, and federal and state policymakers. The goals of the Heritage Languages Initiative and this conference are to continue to make manifest the personal, economic, and social benefits to our nation of preserving and developing the languages spoken by those living in this country; to build a national dialogue on this topic; and to develop an action agenda for the next several years.

In addition to general sessions, participants will have opportunities to meet with special interest constituencies, based on instructional settings, language, and other common concerns. As with the first conference, there will also be poster sessions. Poster session proposals are due April 3, 2002 (contact Ana Mar?a Schwartz: aschwart@umbc.edu).

"Competence in languages other than English is desperately needed in the United States. Our huge and varied heritage language resources have a definite role to play in arriving at such competence."
- Joshua Fishman, Yeshiva and Stanford Universities