‘Heritage Speakers’: Loss of a Treasure?
If the United States is going to take advantage of the linguistic skills of millions of children in this country who speak languages other than English at home, policy has to change at the district, state, and national levels, experts in the field say.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the Dearborn public schools, located in this industrial suburb of Detroit.
Forty percent of the district’s 17,700 students are of Arab descent. Some moved here with their families from Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, or the Palestinian territories, after studying Arabic in school in their home countries. Others are “heritage speakers” of Arabic: They were born in the United States or immigrated here at a young age, but are growing up in homes where...
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