Emergent Bilinguals and Educational Challenges at Public Schools in Japan

紙　版電子版

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 as…

JunkoMAJIMA（マジマジュンコ）

Professor Emerita of Japanese Language Education in the Graduate School of Language and Culture at Osaka University, Japan.
She served as head of the Japanese Language and Culture Section from 2017 to 2021. She is a visiting researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany in 2022. She received her BEd from Kyoto University of Education, Japan, in 1982, and her MEd in 1990 and EdD in foreign language education in 1994 from the University of Georgia, Athens, USA. Her research interests in…

KazukoNAKAJIMA（ナカジマカズコ）

Professor Emerita of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She also taught at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies where she served as director of the Japanese Language Institute.
Her research interests include bilingualism/multilingualism and heritage/minority language education. She has served as principal of the high school division of the Toronto Japanese Language Supplementary School (hoshūkō) till now. She introduced Dr. Jim Cummins and his work promotin…

ChihoSAKURAI（サクライチホ）

Associate Professor of Japanese Language Education in the Graduate School of Language and Culture at Osaka University, Japan. She received her BA and MA from the former Osaka University of Foreign Studies (which merged with Osaka University in 2007) and her PhD from Osaka University in 2013. Her interests are in teaching Japanese as a second language to children, bilingual education, and bilingualism.

ChengzhiSUN（スンチェンジ）

Professor of Japanese Education in the School of Foreign Languages at Dalian University of Technology, China. He received his PhD from Osaka University, Japan, in 2014. His research interests are in teaching Japanese as a second language (JSL), second language acquisition, and Critical Discourse Analysis.

WURIGA（ウリガ）

Associate Professor in the College of Foreign Languages at Taiyuan University of Technology, China. She received her BA in 2008, MA in 2010, and PhD in 2013 from Osaka University, Japan. Her interests are in teaching Japanese language and culture, Chinese-Japanese translation, and bilingual education.

TaoYU（ユウタオ）

a teacher at Yao Municipal Elementary School in Osaka Prefecture.
She provides Japanese Language education to foreign children in public elementary
schools. She received her BEd in 2004 and her MEd in 2006 from Osaka University of Education, Japan,. She is interested in the connection between language and the academic abilities of children living in Japan who grow up in a multilingual environment.