The teaching of the heritage (or family or minority etc.) language plays an important role for many multilingual children and their parents, also in Europe. While there are many extracurricular courses and learning opportunities, some countries (like Sweden or Finland) even include Heritage Language Education (HLE) in their national school system. There is only little research on specific HLE pedagogy and didactics, and even less from a comparative perspective. Thus, this presentation aims to fill this gap through a comparative analysis of the didactic ideas and beliefs of HL teachers. Especially, as the same six heritage languages are researched in the three countries, the analysis can shed light on similarities and differences within languages – and within countries. HLE is characterized by a very high level of heterogeneity in the classrooms, in terms of age, background and language skills etc. HLE often even involves a wide language variety, including different dialects, for example Arabic (cf. Ali 2024). This in turn implies that the approaches need to be adapted to suit the specific HLE context in which they may be implemented, so they are meaningful and feasible for teachers, students and families. All of the teachers face similar obstacles with regard to their working conditions, but the language they teach and the characteristics of their classes vary. Through this comparative analysis we can show if – and how – different languages in HLE influence and shape teachers’ thoughts on didactic ideas in HL teaching. Therefore, the following questions shall be answered in the presentation: • How do teachers of the six different HL in the “Your Language Counts”-project deal didactically with the heterogenous classes they teach (with regard to age, language level, family language and migration background, etc.), • and how do they do this with special regard to the different national frameworks for HLE in the three different countries? The analysis is both qualitative (Kuckartz 2012) and quantitative (data from questionnaires and interviews). The special focus on the didactic specificities of the teaching of a HL enriches research results on HL teachers’ working conditions (cf. Çinar 1998) and nationally/one-language focused research on HLE (cf. Haller 2021, Amro & Iversen 2025). Besides HL classes, there are many different types of classrooms depicting a high diversity of students’ language(s). The results of the project can therefore provide insights that can be useful for teachers in all multilingual heterogeneous classes.

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