These programs are helping high school students to study the language their family speaks at home. They probably speak it fluently, but can't read or write it well. This helps them retain it, and makes this a more bilingual or multilingual country. DP
By Carolyn McGough, Bruin reporter
dailybruin.ucla.edu: Summer sessions at UCLA bring a wide range of faces and ages to the university campus, including some high school students who wish to study and learn about their heritage.
UCLA hosted two six-week “heritage language” programs – Russian and Persian – both of which ended last week.
The programs invited high school students to the university to study their “heritage language.”
Heritage language is the language spoken fluently at home by someone who has little or no formal schooling in the language and therefore may have trouble reading and writing the language, said Olga Kagan, director of the UCLA Center for World Languages and the director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center.
Initially, a “Russian for Russian Speakers” course was created last year and was taught by Yelena Furman, a UCLA Russian language lecturer.
This year, Kagan and the center received funding to program a “Persian for Persian Speakers” course after a grant was received from the National Foreign Language Center, Kagan said.
The Persian language course is taught by Shervin Emami and Saeid Atoofi, both UCLA doctoral students from Iran.
The goal of the summer program is to encourage young United States immigrants to preserve and study their native language.
“Heritage learners or speakers of a language in addition to English have always been multiplying in this country, because it’s built on immigration and you come here with a different language if you immigrate,” Kagan said.
Just because the primary language is English in the U.S., it does not mean languages should be forgotten, she said.:
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