Abstract
Understanding teachers’ thoughts and beliefs may be a tool to help prepare teacher training programs. Community-based school teachers, especially those who work with less commonly taught languages, do not have frequent access to professional development opportunities. Faced with the varied and specific needs of heritage learners, these instructors, who may not have received previous training in language teaching, may find their challenges quite daunting. Given those challenges, they tend to welcome the chance to attend events that help them in their teaching practice. Through a survey about perceptions and beliefs, this study shows that some workshops and other professional development opportunities held by consulates and universities may be of little relevance to the realities faced by teachers who work with heritage LCTLs. Our findings suggest that teacher training programs may prove to be an invaluable tool if they are not episodic, but rather prolonged and based on instructors’ expressed needs.