Heritage

Heritage learners of Russian are students who are born to Russian-speaking parents (or might have one Russian-speaking parent) and get their education in a different language, in case of the U.S. it is English.

The two-semester course dedicated to Russian heritage speakers is designed for heritage speakers who were either born in or arrived at the USA at a pre-school age, and have not yet learned to read or write or have limited reading and writing skills in Russian. For more effective instruction, the course is based on utilizing heritage speaker strength—well-developed aural skills—to develop their much weaker—literacy--skills in a fast and effective way.

In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in its report Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century, identified the course Russian for Heritage Speakers at Columbia University as a pedagogical model that can be adopted elsewhere in the US and applied to the teaching of other heritage languages.

UN3430-3431 Russian for Heritage Speakers course meets a two-year foreign language requirement.