A Narrative-Ethnographic Approach to Research on Heritage Language Development

This chapter presents a qualitative approach to research on heritage language development – narrative ethnography, which integrates text-based methods of narrative analysis with field-based, interaction-enriched methods of linguistic anthropology. It begins with an overview of its epistemological orientations and an exploration of its usefulness for heritage language research before discussing its methodological orientations. It is argued that such an approach is particularly productive for a context-dependent field such as heritage language development. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the merits and challenges of this approach and its potential to advance knowledge about heritage language development and learning.