Heritage Languages in London Secondary Schools: Two Outreach Projects that Raise Awareness of Five Languages

The presentation will describe two grass-root outreach projects, run by UCL and a few secondary schools. It will address questions on multilingualism, heritage and community languages, linguistics citizenship and new immigrant communities and access to university.  PEEL (Proficiency in Eastern European Languages) was an outreach project that ran for three years, covering Romanian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian. It involved over 100 heritage speaker secondary school students and offered plug-the-gap sessions and tests comparable to GCSE exams. RAP (Raising Awareness in Heritage Speakers) is an ongoing outreach project covering Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian heritage speakers together with two more guest languages, Spanish and Portuguese. It collaborates with a secondary school in London, offering three triple sessions at UCL and a symposium, raising awareness of heritage languages and their importance in the UK, involving over 50 students.