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Translanguaging theory re-conceptualizes the linguistic systems and practices of multilinguals as well as multilingual classroom pedagogies. While many studies have documented translanguaging in bi...

In a broader context where English is marketed as a desirable product of consumption, hiring English speakers as language teachers and de facto cultural ambassadors is a common practice in some Eas...

Increasingly, immigrant families in North America are sending their newborns to the parents’ country of origin to be raised by relatives until the children reach school age. Then they are returned ...

This paper investigates Mandarin learning experiences of Chinese American teenagers from working-class families. Drawing on a subset of data from a larger ethnographic study, we focus on 14 middle schoolers who studied Mandarin as a heritage language at a socially engaging school with Mandarin as part of its official curriculum. The data highlight a mismatch between students’ true heritage language and the institutionalized surrogate heritage language, which created unwanted implications for students’ investment and identities in the presence of Mandarin hegemony. In a time when the teaching of Mandarin receives unprecedented educational support, this study calls for more educational efforts that attend to the large population of heritage language learners from non-Mandarin language backgrounds. We suggest that Mandarin educators have critical language awareness so they can address Chinese American students’ multilingual backgrounds in ways that can value their home languages and support their investment ...

Researchers have argued that macro-approaches to heritage language (HL) teaching that take into account heritage language learners' (HLLs) global knowledge of the HL are particularly effective; such macro-approaches are often characterized as discourse-based, content-based, genre-based, task-based, or experiential (Kagan and Dillon 2001, 2008, 2009). This paper describes a set of Mandarin HL curriculum and instructional methods that utilized the notion of macro-approaches to teach secondary students in a STARTALK summer program in 2009. The curriculum built on learners' prior strengths in speaking and listening to improve their writing and reading abilities and validated their hybrid identities as Chinese Americans. Class topics included the Chinese Exclusion Act and Chinese immigration, history and personal memories of Chinatown, intergenerational relationships, personal border-crossing experiences, and pop music in Mandarin-speaking regions. A class blog was used to further enhance HLLs' motiva...