Asst. Prof. Oksana Laleko (SUNY at New Paltz) will give a talk titled "Russian as a heritage language: What we can learn from heritage speakers?"
Abstract: Heritage speakers, or subtractive bilinguals whose dominant language differs from the language to which they were natively exposed in childhood, have been shown to diverge linguistically in principled and systematic ways from monolingual (baseline) speakers and from L2 (second language) learners. The talk discusses the linguistic structure of heritage Russian and presents evidence from production and comprehension experiments to illustrate specific difficulties exhibited by heritage Russian speakers at various proficiency levels in two distinct domains of language, morpho-syntax and discourse-pragmatics. The results provide insights into the nature of linguistic deficits in heritage speakers of Russian and offer additional pedagogical implications for facilitating the acquisition of the heritage language in the classroom.
Everyone who is interested is invited to attend. This event is jointly sponsored by the Slavic Linguistics Forum and the Slavic Literature and Culture Forum.
