Strengthening Heritage Greek Vitality in the United States through a Community-Based Curriculum

Sustainability of Greek as a heritage language in the United States is at stake at present due to the low rates of intergenerational transmission among its speakers, declining immigration from Greece and Cyprus, shortage of specialized teachers, lack of instructional time, old-fashioned teaching methods, and limited opportunities for using the language. This paper builds on the Capacity Development, Opportunity Creation, and and elaborates on how a new community-based curriculum (Gavriilidou & Mitsiaki, 2022) can enable heritage Greek vitality by (a) developing capacity through proficiencybased learning (ACTFL, 2012) in formal and informal settings by laying the emphasis on all registers and linguistic varieties in terms of meaning and for m; (b) creating oppor - tunities for actual Greek heritage language use through engagement in communit y, schoo l, and family context s; and (c) enhancing motivation and desire to use heritage Greek through cognitively challenging content and experiential learning.