Emergent Bilinguals and Educational Challenges at Public Schools in Japan

JunkoMAJIMA, 編著KazukoNAKAJIMA, 著ChihoSAKURAI, 著ほか

In Japan, where the number of foreign residents is increasing rapidly, how are migrant children whose mother tongue is not Japanese learning their mother tongue and Japanese at school? We call them CLD (Culturally Linguistically Diverse) children (Cummins, 1991). This book is the result of the first evidence-based, longitudinal eight-year research study in Japan in the field of language education for CLD children, an empirical study of the bilingual acquisition process involving the same group of CLD children with Chinese background over a six-year period. The book points out some of the difficulties facing Japanese public schools and presents the results of research on the bilingual performances of CLD children throughout the years. We explain the assessment tool developed and used for the research, originally based on the OBC (Oral Proficiency Assessment for Bilingual Children, CAJLE 2000). Later it became part of the DLA (Dialogic Language Assessment, 2014), which was officially developed by a team at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies as a project commissioned by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan). This book supports the transformative pedagogy articulated by Cummins (2016) to see emergent bilingual children as assets of society to cherish and respect, rather than as problems to eliminate. The readers will also find in the last chapter classroom practices of JSL which would imply the idea of translanguaging (Garcia & Li, 2013). For those who are interested in this research and would like to read more, the original Japanese version is available: “Bogo o nakusanai nihongo-kyōiku wa kanō ka - teijū nisei-ji no nigengo nōryoku [Is it Possible to Teach Japanese without Losing One’s Mother Tongue: Bilingual proficiency of settled second generation children]” 2019, ISBN: 978-4872596175 The book cover is inspired by the message of Misuzu Kaneko's poem, ‘Everyone is different, everyone is good’. 日本社会における喫緊の課題の一つである「日本語指導が必要な児童生徒」へのより良い教育に向けて、大阪の中国ルーツの子どもが多い公立小学校での教育実践と二言語力調査に基づいて、「何もなくさない」全人的な教育に対する姿勢や環境整備のあり方を発信する。『母語をなくさない日本語教育は可能か―定住二世児の二言語能力―』(2019年、大阪大学出版会)の英語版。

出版社

大阪大学出版会

発売日

2022-03-15

ページ数

136ページ

ISBN

9784872597424