Heritage Language Educators: Paving the Path in 2025
The start of the journey On February 6, FOHLC Europe organized another free online Café for people involved in heritage language education. The theme of the 2025 cafés is a "Journey around the World," to hear from educators from different language backgrounds. This time, we heard from Rita Dorneles from Universidade de Aveiro and Juliana Azevedo from the Universidad Internacional de la Rioja / Universidad Internacional de Valencia, who talked about their experience with training educators of Brazilian Portuguese as a heritage language. Paving a path Rita and Juliana were exceptional in articulating why it is a tricky task to prepare individuals to educate children in a heritage language. It is more than just learning a language, the lessons must be engaging, and the teachers must be willing to share what works and what does not work in order to develop a pedagogy for this target group. There have been positive developments, but there is still a lot of work to be done: In tr...