Childhood academic language environments of Japanese sojourners: a principal components analysis study

Abstract

This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n 028) and parent (n067) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a JapaneseÁEnglish bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis was conducted to derive three underlying CALE components, each representing educational intervention strategies. These three components were comprised of primary loadings that depict the respective aspects of the Japanese transnational experience with their children's supplementary education during their overseas sojourns and reveal families' needs for: L1 maintenance communities, L2 acquisition support, and a means to convert their children's bilingual skills into academic credentials that are adequate for both L1 and L2 contexts. Principal components were thus interpreted as sojourning families' three approaches to environmental structuring: a Japanese Cultural Community Approach, a Quasi-Bilingual Approach, and a Japanese Test-oriented Approach. Implications are drawn, both for the sojourning community and for future research needs.

The Role of Motivation and Learner Variables in L1 and L2 Vocabulary Development in Japanese Heritage Language Speakers in the United States

“…Given their limited after‐school hours, more activities requiring use of L2 English may mean less opportunity to use their home language. As Langager () pointed out, the three key components in childhood multilingual development—L1 maintenance, L2 acquisition support, and academic credentials in both L1 and L2—must all be continually considered in assessing student progress. Guardians and educators therefore may want to consider balancing the three components in designing supportive environments for multilingual learning.…”

The trends and developments of L2 Japanese research in the 2010s

“…Namely, for JSL children, Japanese is the dominant societal language that they need to acquire to live, study, and work in Japan, whereas for JHL children, Japanese is their home language that they often struggle to develop or maintain. Different labels such as home-background speakers (Koshiba & Kurata, 2012), mixed-heritage background speakers (Shin, 2010), linguistic minority children (Oriyama, 2011), culturally and linguistically diverse children (Nakajima & Sano, 2016), and transnational children (Langager, 2010; Shao-Kobayashi, 2013) are used to refer to JHL learners, who exhibit substantial individual differences in their linguistic and ethnocultural repertoires. Regardless of the labels, however, the majority of them identify themselves as neither fully Japanese nor native citizens of their residence country and demonstrate varying levels of heritage speakers’ traits (Mori & Calder, 2015).…”

Second Language Maintenance Amongst Sojourner Saudi Families After Returning to Their Home Country

“…In the literature, compared to other minority groups, little research has so far considered sojourning groups, and few studies have examined FLPs for first-language maintenance among sojourning families living in English-speaking countries. Examples of the studies to date include those by Bahhari (2020) and Yousef (2022) in the Saudi context, Langager (2010) and Yoshimitsu (1999) in the Japanese context, and Moon…”