In the past few decades, a significant body of linguistic studies have made great strides to understand the diverse linguistic profiles and abilities of adult Spanish heritage speakers. But how do heritage speakers define their own linguistic abilities, their linguistic goals and their needs? In this session, we start with Spanish heritage speakers’ own descriptions of themselves, showing how their heritage language impacts their identities, motivations, and beliefs in profound ways. We then show through their own words what they want to improve about their Spanish and highlight their reasons for wanting to improve their HL, which range from being able to connect with family members to highly specialized professional use of Spanish in national or international workplaces. It is therefore clear that there is not a one-size-fits-all pedagogy for all heritage learners, as instruction needs to be centered around learners’ goals.

We then showcase pedagogical models, including Processing Instruction, task-based instruction, and critical language awareness, that have been tested in experimental research with adult Spanish heritage language speakers (predominantly at the college level). We demonstrate the overall benefits of SHL instruction on learners’ confidence, language attitudes, and linguistic abilities. On the whole, adult SHL learners demonstrate measurable but often modest gains from instruction (Bowles & Torres, in press) but more detail is needed about what specific features of instruction are most effective for adult HL learners.

The effects of instruction in adulthood can only go so far, given what we know about language learning past puberty. What if we could instruct SHL learners far earlier, while they are still children? There has been an explosion in the number of dual language programs in the U.S., mostly at the K-5 level, with Spanish being the most common partner language (Boyle et al., 2015). While we still lack research on the effects of specific pedagogical models (e.g., translanguaging pedagogy, language arts) on the development of SHL in dual immersion contexts, a growing body of research suggests that dual language programs may indeed be a promising avenue for heritage language maintenance and growth, an observation supported by recent research developments on the effects of instruction on Spanish heritage bilingual children.

We conclude the session with a guided discussion with institute participants about how learners’ needs (and therefore our pedagogy) might need to adapt down the road when an increasing number of our SHL learners arrive to our college classrooms having had Spanish instruction through dual immersion. We also engage with the audience on how to enter in dialogue with communities about their successes and challenges in maintaining the heritage language in their local context. Further, how do we share research that highlights the importance and value of early HL education in the development of the heritage language? Only by bridging the gap between the academy and the community will we be able to make the largest impact.