Our overarching recommendation is for instructors to leverage HLLs’ particular strengths, and implement instructional practices that build from their learners’ actual proficiency levels. HLLs bring highly developed oral language skills, which often place them at an advantage over their L2 peers with respect to their readiness to process complex input. Since input is the cornerstone of acquisition, instructors can exploit these receptive skills, accelerating the development of their students’ proficiency by exposing them to a variety of rich input.

HLLs typically have a vast vocabulary that pertains to informal context/content, vocabulary that is difficult to come about in academic textbooks. On the other hand, HLLs are typically less familiar with formal, academic, and professional context/content. One type of knowledge can be used to scaffold the development of the other by working with input that integrates both (some works of fiction do this really well), and gradually moving from there to formal contexts (for example, practice writing one letter to a family member and then one to a professor). We caution instructors against presenting these kinds of contexts without transition, which might exacerbate feelings of linguistic insecurity, which HLLs are already vulnerable to.

HLLs tend to have very limited literacy experiences in the heritage language. Access to reading and writing in the heritage language might be impeded by a lack of knowledge of the writing system (if the heritage language employs a non-Roman alphabet or a logographic system). With this in mind, instructors should assess learners’ abilities and work from their actual proficiency levels in reading and writing.

HLLs might be unable to explicitly explain what they know implicitly. Lack of metalinguistic awareness and associated vocabulary is not an impediment to proficiency development and literacy development. HLLs at Intermediate and Advanced level of proficiency have a robust implicit linguistic system in place that can be further developed by exposing them to input and output practices at the appropriate level.

Finally, we recommend that instructors keep the affective dimension in mind as well. HLLs might come to class with very low “linguistic self-esteem”, usually the result of the status of minority languages and the varieties they speak. Incorporating sociolinguistic awareness through critical discussion of issues of power and identity as they relate to language, and taking the explicit stance that no language (variety) is “better” (linguistically speaking) than another, promotes linguistic confidence and motivation, which in turn might have a positive effect on proficiency development. For models on how to work within critical pedagogy see Leeman (2005).