Cooper Lender
Cooper Lender, a high school senior, is bilingual and passionate about language acquisition and maintenance. He speaks English, Spanish, and is learning Japanese. He loves learning about different languages and feels that learning a language is key to really understanding other cultures and histories. Cooper participated in the Reischauer Scholars program at Stanford University, where he learned more about Japanese culture and US-Japan relations. He started the Heritage Language Story Project (https://www.heritagelanguagestory.org/) that encourages heritage speakers to share their story about their experiences with their home language. He hopes to support heritage language speakers in seeing the value in maintaining their home languages.
