Russian heritage language learner narratives revisited: a look at non-prototypical learners

This study bridges a gap in heritage language (HL) research to date by focusing on learners that do not neatly fit the often-cited definitions and profiles of HL learners (e.g., Polinsky & Kagan, 2007; Carreira & Kagan, 2011). We study the effects of L1 attrition of Russian in teenage HL learners several years after exposure to the HL in the immediate family or community has ceased, due either to international adoption or to other restricted access to Russian speakers. We compare them in the context of re-exposure through a short-term cultural and language immersion program to age-matched foreign language (L2) learners. Each participant in the program produced oral narratives in two sessions, three and a half weeks apart, and the resulting narratives were coded and analyzed for fluency and accuracy. Although the results show significant attrition in the language of the HL learners, they surpassed the L2 learners in several fluency and accuracy measures. We discuss the strategies that both learner groups used in their narratives, as well as implications of these findings for HL acquisition research and pedagogy