Language revitalization and language pedagogy: new teaching and learning strategies

Language learning and teaching of endangered languages have many features and needs that are quite different from the teaching of world languages. Groups whose languages are endangered try to turn language loss around; many new language teaching and learning strategies are emerging, to suit the special needs and goals of language revitalization. The teaching of 'foreign languages', 'majority languages', 'heritage languages' and endangered languages is compared in this paper. Because of the paucity of language teaching resources for endangered languages, and especially because of the special goals of learning for language revitalization, individuals and communities and the professionals who work with them are developing novel ways of teaching and learning their ancestral language, to meet the goals of language learners and their communities. Keywords: language revitalizationIndigenous languagesimmersion schoolslanguages without speakerslanguage teaching methodslanguage learning methods Notes 1. Some heritage languages with a long-standing history in the United States have developed unique dialects spoken nowhere else. Linguists studying these varieties point out that we must also recognize the existence of 'endangered dialects' (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes Citation1995). 2. Julia Sallabank (pers. comm.) mentions, however, that there is a current debate about norms for English as a lingua franca, in response to the fact that there are now more nonnative speakers than native speakers. 3. In colonized or previously colonized countries, on the other hand, where the colonizing language is widely spoken, new varieties of the colonizer language may develop. 'New Englishes', for example, abound in the postcolonial world. 4. Heritage languages may behave in a manner somewhat similar to what I have said here about endangered languages. As mentioned in Note 1, a language that is spoken by a long-standing immigrant community is likely to exhibit differences from the language as spoken in the home country, both by the retention of archaisms and by an influence from the majority language, as well as by just taking a different path of language change from the home country (see Cope Citation2011). In fact, as these local speech varieties begin to disappear, they too are endangered, and will change yet in more and different ways in the context of language revitalization.