Studying Russian as a heritage language in French-speaking countries: what is the theoretical framework?

Abstract

This contribution examines the adoption, within the field of language education, of the concept of heritage language, initially developed in the field of English as a foreign language teaching. Building on this conceptual transfer, it explores how linguistic research can contribute to the development of a theoretical and methodological framework suitable for the design of teaching materials.

More specifically, the study draws on research on Russian as a heritage language, particularly the work of Polinsky (2014 onwards). We hypothesize that linguists and language educators working on Russian as a foreign language in French-speaking countries, particularly Switzerland and France, can draw on this research to analyze their corpora, and that the results of these analyses can, in turn, contribute to and enrich research on heritage languages.