Writing strategies to develop literacy skills for Spanish heritage language learners

Heritage language learners (HLLs) need to be exposed to different genres of academic texts (Chevalier, 2004; Correa, 2016) and instructors need to find resources to maximize HLLs’ learning experiences. There are multiple gains in improving HLLs’ writing to create an awareness of the power of the HL through the use of authentic resources with a meaningful goal. Since HLLs should be able to distinguish between registers and genres (Chevalier, 2004), writing chronicles is an effective way to master their communicative competence (Fuentes, 2018). Finally, HLLs’ writing is assessed holistically through rubrics moving from a focus on content to language