Reproditive Bilingualism

Language competence is an essential component of personal, academic, and economic processes and success. Children of first-generation immigrants, who are raised in homes where a language other than English is spoken, grow up with a better-than-average opportunity to develop additive bilingualism, that is, proficiency in both English and their heritage language.

In American schools, many do not realize this potential. Soon after they enter school, the expectations, pressures, and desire to assimilate into the majority culture lead immigrant children to quickly abandon their heritage terminology for English, as Lily Wong Fillmore and other researchers have found.

Studies have also shown, repeatedly, the positive effects of high quality additive bilingualism on immigrant children's academic achievement,
Indeed, some persons retain very little of their ancestral languages and are nonetheless known as heritage speakers because they retain some degree of passive knowledge of the language.

Furthermore, heritage language speakers differ from traditional foreign-language learners in that they are likely to possess cultural knowledge that enables them to understand subtle nuances and to practice culturally appropriate behaviors more readily perhaps, than do those who study the same language as a foreign language.

Often, however, heritage language speakers have not received formal instruction in the language and, thus, may lack the prestige or formal registers of the language, literacy skills, a highly developed vocabulary, and grammatical accuracy in the language. Debate exists about the characteristics and linguistic profiles of heritage language speakers because of the broad diversity of life circumstances that can connect an individual to a language.

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