Communicative Competence and the Acquisition of Variation by Heritage Speakers Abroad Main Methods, Principal Findings, and Future Directions

Abstract

The acquisition of variation abroad has informed learner development of communicative competence, composed of grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic competences (Canale & Swain, 1980; Kanwit & Solon, 2023). Of these sub-competences, sociolinguistic competence, a learner’s sensitivity to contextual factors, has received increasing emphasis. Early research on acquisition abroad often reported inconsistent gains following a sojourn, perhaps because learners were assessed using global metrics (see Collentine, 2004). More recent work has targeted sociolinguistic competence via structures differentially present in regional input by creating fine-grained
tasks eliciting such structures (Geeslin, 2022). Despite recent attention to the second language acquisition (SLA) of variation abroad (Zahler et al., 2023), comparable analyses of heritage speakers have lagged (though see Pozzi et al., 2021). Accordingly, this chapter outlines communicative competence, notes principal methods implemented in analyzing acquisition of variation abroad, describes recent developments and key findings, and offers future directions for research on heritage language acquisition abroad.