Nurturing Heritage Students’ Bilingual and Bicultural Identity in Mainstream Schools

Over the last two years (2024-25), Haileybury has undertaken a major review of its P-6 Languages program. One element of the project was on redefining the goals of the Background Chinese course, which is currently offered to students with Chinese heritage from Years 5-10. When we embarked on the review, it was decided that the focus would be on innovation rather than problem solving, and therefore, the review gave all involved an opportunity to ask fundamental questions about why, who, what and how we are teaching. By answering these questions, it became clear that we needed to bring the importance of this course as a means of nurturing Chinese heritage students’ bilingual and bicultural identity to the forefront. By carefully considering the role heritage language plays in the lives of second-generation immigrant students, in 2024, we redesigned a brand-new curriculum with engaging content and retrained our entire staff team in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pedagogy for implementation in 2025. In this session, we will share our progress to date and challenge you to also consider how heritage students’ bilingual and bicultural identity can be nurtured in Languages classrooms.