"Linguistic Production and Perception in Heritage Language"
Gláucia Silva
Professor of Portuguese, UMass Dartmouth 

Heritage language (HL) speakers tend to assess their linguistic competence in binary terms, such as "good" and "bad," and to consider that they speak "slang" or a "broken" language (Byram et al., 2021). However, research on HL production does not confirm these perceptions: Rinke et al. (2024) show that structures that prove most challenging for HL bilinguals are also problematic for monolingual speakers. Furthermore, Torregrossa et al. (2023) indicate that age and formal instruction in the HL may lead to better performance in those challenging structures. Drawing on examples from Portuguese grammar, this talk discusses research on linguistic production in HL, including gender and verb tenses, as well as the perception of learners in relation to instruction and to their own abilities in the HL.

Bio: Gláucia Silva is a Professor in the Department of Portuguese at UMass Dartmouth. She specializes in heritage and foreign language learning, with a focus on Portuguese. Professor Silva has co-authored four Portuguese language textbooks and is the author of Word Order in Brazilian Portuguese (De Gruyter, 2001/2013). She has also published several scholarly articles and book chapters, both in English and in Portuguese. Her graduate advisees have investigated different aspects related to Portuguese language and linguistics, such as the roles of attitude and motivation in learning Portuguese, service encounters in Portuguese in Massachusetts, gay articulations of desire in Rio de Janeiro, the impact of anxiety on learning Portuguese, using songs in the foreign language classroom, task-based language teaching, and mother-child interactions in a bilingual family, among others.

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom. 

The event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by the Language Resource Center, the Department of Romance Studies, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program through its Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) grant from the U.S. Department of Education.