New type of Learner Emerging: Understanding Learners of Chinese as a Heritage Language

Abstract

With the recent influx of immigrants from Chinese speaking regions to all over the world, in many countries there now exist a noticeable Chinese community. Within these overseas Chinese communities there emerge great needs to maintain the Chinese language and culture among the younger generations and accordingly there emerges a new type of learner who are ethnically Chinese and have some competence in Chinese yet still needs to learn the language systematically. When these learners go to the classroom to study the Chinese language, they are often treated the same as the traditional foreign language learners of Chinese, and their unique characteristics and learning needs are often ignored. The current article aims to provide an insight into the understanding of this new type of learner of the Chinese language. Adopting the term ‘heritage language learners’ to classify this new type of learner, the article starts with a discuss of how ‘heritage language’ and ‘heritage language learners’ are defined in literature, and then elaborates the general characteristics of HL learners that have be reported by previous research on heritage learners of various other languages. Based on this background knowledge, the specific challenges existing in the learning of Chinese as a heritage language are then discussed and the characteristics of Chinese heritage learners presented. Finally some existing research gaps in the research of Chinese heritage language learners are discussed.