The National Heritage Language Resource Center (NHLRC) at the University of California, Los Angeles has been awarded four years of grant funding for fiscal years 2022–2025 by the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Language Resource Centers (LRC) program to improve the nation's capacity to teach and learn foreign languages effectively, particularly less commonly taught languages. The university will receive about $760,000 to cover  project and operational expenses of the Heritage Center. This is the fifth round of LRC funding that the NHLRC has received since its establishment in 2006.

NHLRC Program Initiatives (2022-2025)

The NHLRC is the only LRC focused entirely on heritage languages and their speakers. Over the next four years, the center will continue its mission to (1) sponsor research into the linguistic profiles and pedagogical needs of HL learners; (2) translate this new knowledge into practical professional development for language teachers; and (3) disseminate this work widely.

The initiatives for the current cycle are:

Learning & Teaching Initiatives

• Summer Teacher Workshops –The annual teacher workshops provide professional development opportunities to create suitable curriculum and materials for HL learners. K-16 and community school instructors receive training in the principles of HL curricula and materials development for HL instruction.
• Online HL Teaching Certificates and Badges – To fill gaps in language teacher training and expand opportunities for asynchronous professional development, the NHLRC has developed five self-paced online modules for HL teachers.
• Open Educational Resources – To address the need for appropriate materials for HL classes, the NHLRC will support the development and use of OERs for HL teaching in collaboration with our partners at Kansas University.
• Southeast Asian Language Pedagogy Symposia – the center will collaborate with the joint-Berkeley-UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the UCLA Asia Pacific Center to host language pedagogy workshops for instructors of SEA languages to cover topics such as differentiated instruction, project-based language learning, oral proficiency assessment, and technology training for classroom hybridization.
• Dual Language Immersion – the center will work with local school districts to identify factors of parents/caregivers, teachers, and students that contribute to the development, maintenance, and retainment of the heritage language beyond DLI programs.

Research Initiatives

• Research Institutes – The annual summer research institutes bring together diverse groups of scholars and language practitioners across disciplines to share research findings and set new directions in the field of heritage languages.
• Digital Repositories – The NHLRC will work with Pennsylvania State University’s CALPER to develop digital repositories to facilitate the collection, storage, and ethical sharing of data from scholarly HL research and pedagogical materials from language practitioners.
• Heritage Language Survey – To enhance our understanding of issues affecting students in higher education, we will expand the HL survey at the national level to examine how college HL programs impact language proficiency of students as well as outcomes that are not strictly linguistic (e.g., motivations and attitudes) with the aim to learn what factors help further their HL knowledge, predict higher self-rated proficiency, and increase motivation to transmit the HL.
• Community College Focus Groups – The center will work with local community colleges to identify instructional and institutional factors that affect the linguistic and academic development of community college HL students as well as their socio-affective needs.
• Project-Based Language Learning – The center will conduct a pilot study with the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa’s NFLRC on the PBLL framework in university HL classrooms with the aim to examine how PBLL can be integrated effectively into existing language curricula; specify conditions for optimal results; and address potentials and limitations in PBLL design, execution, and classroom presentation.

Community Building & Research Dissemination

• Conferences – The center will disseminate information on our projects through our Fifth Quadrennial International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages (2026), the annual conferences of the Coalition of Community-based Heritage Language Schools, and the Southwest Conference on Language Teaching.
• Heritage Language Journal – The HLJ has defined the field since its founding by the NHLRC in 2002, and the center will continue its partnership with Brill Publishers that has brought new distinction and increased visibility to the journal, substantially raising its global standing in the field of HL studies.
• Community-Based HL Schools – The NHLRC will continue working closely with the Coalition of Community-based Language Schools in their effort to create a network of resources, professional development opportunities, and support for HL community schools.
• Bridging Research and Practice – In our efforts to foster understanding between language researchers and practitioners, the center will expand its webinars and podcasts to include an HL YouTube Channel.

The Language Resource Centers Program

Congratulations to all sixteen of the Title VI Language Resource Centers that received funding in this cycle:

AELRC – Assessment and Evaluation Language Resource Center, Georgetown University

CALPER – Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research, The Pennsylvania State University

CARLA – Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, University of Minnesota

CASLS – Center for Applied Second Language Studies, University of Oregon

CEDAR – Curricular Enhancement, Development, Access, and Research, University of Cincinnati

CeLCAR – Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region, Indiana University

CERCLL – Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language, and Literacy, University of Arizona 

CILC – Center for Integrated Language Communities, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

CULTR – Center for Urban Language Teaching and Research, Georgia State University

NALRC – National African Language Resource Center, Indiana University

NFLRC – National Foreign Language Resource Center, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

NHLRC – National Heritage Language Resource Center, University of California, Los Angeles

NLRC – National Less Commonly Taught Languages Resource Center, Michigan State University

NRCAL – National Resource Center for Asian Languages, California State University, Fullerton

PEARLL – Professionals in Education Advancing Research and Language Learning, University of Maryland, College Park

SEELRC – Slavic and Eurasian Language Resource Center, Duke University

More information

Learn more about the Language Resource Centers Program

Joint LRC website