A New Year and New Ways to Enhance Heritage Language Skills: How to Make Home Language Goals Successful in 2024
There is evidence that the custom of making New Year’s resolutions can be traced back back 4,000 years to the Babylonians who made promises to the gods at the start of each year which began in mid-March. The modern form New Year’s resolutions appeared as a common practice in the early nineteenth century.
While the content of the resolutions has changed over time, the theme of focusing on goals to achieve to improve oneself, one’s circumstances, or one’s family and community, has remained constant in the modern era. Many people today focus on self-improvement goals related to health or enhancing a skill. If you would like to use New Year’s resolutions as an opportunity to commit to improving your home language, you are not alone. Many people focus on improving thier home language as a New Year’s resolution.
While New Year’s resolutions are popular to make, with a one-third to 40 percent of the U.S. population reporting they make them annualy, they are harder to maintian. In fact, research suggests that while adherence to self selected New Year’s resolutions is high at first, by two years post resolution setting self reported adherence falls below 20 percent.
There is research that suggets the way we structure our New Year’s resolutions can be the key to their success. If you have set a New Year’s resolution around enhancing your heritage language skills, consider these points below as ways to enhance your success.
Break down a large goal into specific subordinate goals.
It is important to identify subordiante goals of your larger goal. For example, if your larger goal is to “impove my ability to speak and understand my home language” identify small sub-goals. For example, “I will improve my home language reading skills by reading a newspaper in my heritage language for 10-minutes, 5 times a week.” or “I will speak in my home language to relatives in my home country three times a week for at least 10 minutes each time to enhance my use of vocabulary that is actually used in my home country.” These subordinate goals will yield greater success than setting broad goals, such as “I will improve my home language reading skills.” or “I will practice speaking in my home language more often.”
Ensure goals are measurable, prioritized on your calendar, and scheduled for times when you will likely be successful.
Setting a time limit for the activity and a frequency for the activity is important in ensuring it is measurable and attainable. Using the timer on your cell phone to time sessions and placing the session on your calendar will help to make them more likely to occur. Also, scheduling the activity at a time of day you are likely to have energy and focus to complete the task is critical. For example, “I will read a newspaper in my home language for 10 minutes each evening after dinner and before I watch television.” provides measurable goals that are prioritized on your calendar at a time of day when it is likely to occur.
Consider ways to increase motivation by including others in your goal.
Research has shown that making your goals social, including others in them, can increase motivation. For example, “I will speak with my Aunt in my home language three times a week for about 10 minutes” or “I will watch a movie in my heritage language once a week with my cousin, Jane.”
Ensure reinforcers are built into your plan.
Embedding reifnrocers or things you look forward to within your plan can help mantain motivation. For example, “I will study food names and ordering food three times a week for 10 minutes each and then when I feel ready, I will go with my friend to a restarunt that serves my hertiage country’s food.”
Be ready to alter goals, if needed.
Being flexible with your goals can ehance success. For exmaple, if you are finding that you can only speak to family in your home language once a week, when your goal was three times a week, chage the goal to reflect what you can do. Research has shown that we can become unmotivated and give up if our goals are not attainable
While the recommendations above are included to address language goals, they can be used to address any kind of goals. Wishing you good luck with you New Year’s resolution goals!
Photo Credit: Nick Morrison on Unsplash.
Information for this piece was sourced from the following:
Harvard Health Publishing. Seven steps for making your new year’s resolutions stick. November 24, 2020. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/seven-steps-for-making-your-new-years-resolutions-stick
