Additionally, we were very happy to offer a speaker series that was open to all educators, scholars, and general enthusiasts!
Information sessions were presented by invited speakers and experts in the field and provided participants with summarized information on central topics of interest in heritage language education.
HL Assessment
Young-A Son is a multilingual and multicultural applied linguist. She currently works as a Research Analyst at Language Testing International where she conducts research on rater behavior, score interpretation, and rating process efficiency.
Previously, she was an Analytics and Assessment Specialist at the Center for Educational Effectiveness in the University of California, Davis, and an Evaluation Specialist at the Language Testing Unit of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), US Department of State. As a heritage language speaker herself, her main academic research interest is on heritage language learning, test design, test use validation, and research design and methods. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University in 2018.
HL Motivation
Dr. Julio Torres is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism in the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese with courtesy appointments in the School of Education and Language Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is a multilingual speaker (Spanish, English, French) who grew up with Spanish as a heritage language.
He directs the Spanish language program and the minor in Spanish/English Bilingual Education. His research focuses on usage-based approaches to instructed heritage/second language acquisition, multilingualism and task-based language learning, and he has been the recipient of the 2014 Russell Campbell’s Young Scholar Recognition Award for the field of heritage language education and the 2020 School of Humanities Teaching Award at UC Irvine.
Dr. Francesca Venezia
The Basics of HLE
Francesca Venezia (PhD Linguistics, Georgetown University) is a Researcher at Mathematica where she conducts research on the implementation and improvement of programs and policies in various sectors including K-12 education.
During her graduate studies, her research focused on heritage language learners, language policy, and community-based learning. Francesca is a heritage speaker of Spanish (and Italian, depending on your definition!)
Donation to Non-Profit Organizations
These speaker sessions were $10/session, and all funds collected through the series went to two non-profit organizations.
We were able to raise and donate $260 from our speaker sessions this year!
Half of the money was donated to Voices of Children, a non-profit that offers psychological support to children of war.
The other half was donated to a non-profit chosen by the colloquium participants!
This year’s participants chose Migrant Justice, a non-profit that provides support to the farmworker community and engages community partners to organize for economic justice and human rights.
