Heritage language lessons are an established part of the curriculum at Austrian schools. They are realized with the aim to enhance students’ heritage language skills as well as to convey knowledge on history, geography and culture of the countries of origin. Furthermore, the students are supposed to face up to a bicultural lifestyle. As reported by Garnitschnig (2015, 7 et seq.) in the school year 2013/2014 a total of 33920 students took part in heritage language lessons, meaning that 18.5% of all multilingual students in Austrian schools attend heritage language classes. These classes are hold by 422 teachers, who teach 25 different languages. Compared to teachers of other school subjects the labor situation of heritage language teachers is characterized by unstable circumstances, such as fixed-term contracts (cf. Fleck 2009), the need for high mobility (they mainly work at several schools; Garnitschnig 2015, 43), low contacts to other teaching staff and low income. The teachers predominantly completed an academic education in their country of origin, but only some of them completed teacher training programs, and only a few in the area of language or linguistics (cf. Moser 2013). Therefore and since there is no teacher training for heritage languages in Austria so far, most heritage language teachers didn’t complete an appropriate teacher training. It can be assumed that the majority of the teachers are self-educated persons in the field of (heritage) language teaching. In the classrooms they are faced with extremely heterogeneous learning groups in terms of age and language skills. Starting from the described initial situation the research project "Possibilities, limitations and positioning - perspectives of heritage language teachers in Austria" amongst other topics explores the aims related to language the teachers pursue. For this purpose qualitative interviews with 9 teachers of the most frequent heritage languages (e.g. Turkish, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Albanian) in different Austrian federal states were conducted and evaluated by using the qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz 2014). The proposed paper gives a summary of teachers’ perceptions of literacy and writing skills, literacy- and writing-related goals they pursue in the classroom and in which extent normative and functional orientations play a role in this context.

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