The Negotiation of Multilingual Heritage Identity in a Distance Environment: HLA and the Plurilingual Turn

Abstract

This article expands upon a plenary presentation I delivered at the 2017 Arizona CALL Conference at Arizona State University. I will discuss some current perspectives in second language acquisition (SLA) which have implications for heritage language acquisition (HLA) and provide some examples from longitudinal data collected among heritage learners who participated in a collaborative program to share less commonly taught languages via videoconferencing among Yale, Columbia, and Cornell. Our findings indicate that many of the heritage language learners (HLLs) had complex multilingual backgrounds which affected both their sense of identity and their motivations for learning the heritage language. I will argue that a more dynamic model of HLA may provide a better understanding of how HLLs negotiate and construct their identities in a plurilingual world.