“At the end of the day, some our best students are kids from Iowa, absolute beginners who do not have the vocabulary or some kind of the cultural underpinnings of the language,” he said. “Ultimately someone’s going to learn the language by discipline and motivation and study. Heritage learners take the class and think it’s going to be an easy A, and it isn’t.”

Some professors, however, say offering separate heritage classes can be uniquely beneficial to students with experience in the language.

Senior Preceptor in Romance Languages and Literature Maria Luisa Parra-Velasco said she developed the College’s only two heritage track Spanish courses to fill a perceived niche of students who grew up immersed in Latino language and culture but are not confident in their abilities to communicate in academic Spanish.

“Usually in heritage classes, we start with what the students know as the base, and we work very hard to validate that knowledge,” she said. “They come to our classrooms feeling they don’t speak well, so we work with those beliefs from a sociolinguistic point of view.”

While Parra-Velasco said her department has no current plans to expand Spanish heritage offerings, she sees increased heritage tracking as “following a national trend.”

“I think that the heritage languages are being recognized more and more as a national resource, and there are a lot of faculty that is committed to making sure the students value that heritage and make it part of their lives,” she said.

—Staff writer Caroline C. Hunsicker contributed reporting to this story.

—Staff writer Daphne C. Thompson can be reached at daphne.thompson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @daphnectho.

This article has been revised to reflect the following clarification:

CLARIFICATION: March 10, 2015

An earlier version of this article stated that students in Arabic courses learn alongside heritage speakers. To clarify, these courses include students with prior experience in the Arabic language more broadly.