Yasuko Kanno

Linguistic Minority Students in Higher Education: Using, Resisting, and Negotiating Multiple Labels.

Linguistic minority students have been both under-researched and underserved in the context of research on minority students’ access to and retention in higher education. The labels ascribed to them have typically failed to capture the complexity of their identities. Additionally, much of the literature in higher education on minority students’ access and retention has focused on structural barriers rather than on how students negotiate these barriers. By bringing linguistic minority students into the forefront of this conversation, we show how four linguistic minority female students draw on their community cultural wealth and different forms of capital (Yosso, 2005) to access and navigate college while experiencing differing advantages and disadvantages based on institutional labeling. By employing critical race theory and its conceptualization of capital, we illustrate how students use, resist, and negotiate labels in attempts to access resources and services at a four-year institution. We conclude by calling for more research on this population as well as additive university practices and policies that reflect the richness of linguistic minority student identities.

Bilingualism in international schools: a model for enriching language education

If there is one educational setting where bilingualism is valued and nurtured, one would think that it is the international school. International schools, which exist around the world, serve educational needs of expatriate children from diverse language backgrounds. The staff composition is often international as well, and the parents are generally eager to instil in their children a cosmopolitan mindset. One paradox of the international school, then, is that despite such built-in linguistic and cultural diversity, bilingualism is not as aggressively promoted as one would imagine, and, instead, English often dominates as the sole language of instruction. NonEnglish-speaking students are referred to as ESL students rather than bilinguals. Maurice Carder, who has taught at the Vienna International School in Austria since 1981 and is currently the head of its ESL and Mother-Tongue Department, has written Bilingualism in International Schools as a call for international schools around the world to promote additive bilingualism more effectively. In this endeavour, Carder proposes a three-prong model for enriching language education for second language (L2) learners (29):

New Editors’ Introduction

As we step in as new co-editors of the Journal of Language, Identity & Education (JLIE), we would like to introduce ourselves and say a few words about our vision for the journal. JLIE was the brainchild of Thomas Ricento and Terrence Wiley. Just as anyone who adopts someone else’s child would take their responsibility very seriously, we are feeling the weight of the baton Tom and Terry passed on to us after 14 years of outstanding editorship. We will do our utmost in ensuring JLIE’s continuing success and relevance. Terry and Tom envisioned the journal to be an interdisciplinary forum for “both original research and critical studies on the intersections of language, identity, and education in global and local contexts” (Ricento & Wiley, 2002, p. 4), and this focus will remain unchanged under our editorship. At the center of the journal’s scope is our shared interest in issues related to language, and under our editorship, JLIE will continue to serve as a forum for discussion on how issues of language learning and teaching impact individual and community identities and intersect with educational practices and policies. This journal also has had a strong international scope. In the past 14 volumes JLIE has published articles by authors from 37 countries and on topics of education and identity in connection with 69 languages. We intend to maintain this strong international outlook. At the same time, it is often the case that as new editors step in to lead a journal, they begin to put their own imprint on the journal. We expect it to be the case with our editorship as well. First of all, we are both committed to publishing the kinds of studies that make tangible differences in the lives of language learners, teachers, and language minority communities broadly construed, as opposed to theoretical papers for the sake of arguing theory. Yasuko is a former English language learner who learned English in a stark sink-or-swim environment in the U.K. She is committed to creating more dignifying and rewarding language learning environments for language minority students. Wayne, a former ESL and Khmer bilingual teacher, has witnessed firsthand the impact of language and education policies on schools and communities, and is committed to promoting high quality instruction for language minority students. Thus, it personally matters to us that the studies we publish in JLIE ultimately contribute to improving the lives of language learners, teachers, and members of bilingual and multilingual communities. JLIE was also originally intended to be an outlet for “critical studies on the implications of monoculturalist approaches to education and their consequences for minorities and diverse societies” (Ricento & Wiley, 2002, p. 4). However, in the last several years, the journal has been focusing on publishing studies that richly describe interrelationships among language, identity, and education around the world, and consequently, the critical focus has perhaps received less attention. We would like to return to the critical focus and welcome submissions that address questions of how monolinguistic and monoculturalist approaches to education reproduce existing power relations in society and narrow the range of identities that individual language learners and teachers can claim for themselves. Likewise, we encourage submissions highlighting the potential of multilingual and multicultural approaches to counteract and challenge existing societal forces. We also would like to see more diversified theoretical frameworks and methodologies used to explore issues of language, identity, and education. JLIE in recent years has published a number of studies that employ theories involving linguistic/cultural capital, investment, imagined communities, heteroglossia, and situated learning, among others, as theoretical frameworks. Although these theories have been and will continue to be indisputably useful, we also welcome new theories that can

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School

Zhonghua Chinese Ethnic School (grades K–9) is physically a tiny school. Although it houses more than 300 students, it has only one dilapidated five-story building with a small additional center for kindergarten. Both the classrooms and hallways are packed with students. On the floors with the younger graders, in particular, you need considerable physical dexterity to dodge kids who come shooting your way. They bump into each other with alarming force — both boys and girls — but as far as they are concerned, observers like me who look relatively young and are eminently lacking an air of authority are also fair game. Their uncomplicated affection was hard to resist, but it did result in a bruise or two. The school yard is equally small: If you stand in front of the building, you have a view of the entire yard — plus a view of the Japanese elementary school next door. It is customary at this school for students to go outside and participate in a group exercise during the morning recess, but the school yard is so small that elementary and junior high school students have to exercise on alternate days.

Imagined Communities, School Education, and Unequal Access to Bilingualism

While the previous five chapters provided detailed narratives of the policies and practices of each of the five schools, this chapter takes a step back and compares the five schools. By analyzing the relationship among imagined communities, school policies and practices, and student bilingualism and identities, I aim to provide insights as to why access to bilingualism is given freely to some children but not to others.

Framing the Study

This chapter frames the study and provides the rationale for its theoretical and methodological approach. First, I provide a historical overview of cultural and linguistic diversity in Japan, focusing in particular on the rapid increase of foreign nationals in the past two decades. This section is followed by a discussion of previous studies of bilingual education in Japan. I then discuss the theoretical framework of the study, which draws on the notion of imagined communities and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction. The chapter concludes with a detailed description of the process of the study.

Sugino Public Elementary School

Sugino Public Elementary School is located in a large subsidized housing project. Because of its location and the subsidized apartments, the school has an unusually high proportion of foreign-national students for a public school. Of the 226 students, 99 (or 43 percent) are language minority students (66 are of foreign nationalities and 33 naturalized Japanese). Fifty-three percent of the foreign-national students are Chinese, and the others are mostly the children of war refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The majority came to Japan at a young age or were born in Japan. The Chinese children are mostly family members and relatives of war orphans, who are given priority in settling in the housing project. The high concentration of refugees — a small portion of the foreign population in Japan — in the housing project has to do with the existence of a refugee settlement center in the vicinity. Although the center closed several years before, many of the Indochinese refugees, who spent their first days in Japan at the center, have since settled and found jobs in the area. Many of Sugino’s children, both Japanese and non-Japanese, come from single-parent homes and families on welfare, since eligibility for the housing project is limited to low-income families. The first time I walked to the school from the nearby train station, I wondered why I was passing by so many people in wheelchairs.

Nichiei Immersion School

Nichiei Immersion School is a private school that offers a K-12 early partial English immersion program (K-8 at the time of my fieldwork). The immersion program is paired with a regular (i.e., non-immersion) program. The majority of the immersion students are native Japanese-speaking children who have never lived abroad and come into the program with little or no English proficiency. The students in grades 1–2 receive approximately two thirds of the instruction in English (math, science, social studies, music, fine arts, physical education, and computer) and one third in Japanese (language arts). In grade 3, music is switched to Japanese, taught by a specialist. From grade 4, social studies and fine art are added to the Japanese component, bringing the proportion of Japanese instruction up to approximately 50 percent (see Figure 3.1). The immersion students use an English translation of the textbooks that the students in the regular program use. After the completion of each unit, students in both programs are given the same test in Japanese.

Midori Public Elementary School

Midori Town is a small, industrial town — it is a rather sleepy place. Its economy is supported by a couple of large manufacturing companies and their small subsidiary factories. Streets are wide with tall, lush trees — something not seen in more urban cities in Japan. The only train, which has but three cars, that connects this town to the next provides an hourly service. I rode the train again and again with a group of high school girls with ash dyed-blonde hair and blue, almost theatrical, eye shadow: a look that had been popular among girls in Tokyo the previous year. It is mostly students who use the train; most adults drive to go places. Indeed, it is difficult to live in Midori Town without access to a car. Large shopping malls are located on the outskirts of the town. And in this small town, 14 percent of the approximately 43,000 residents are foreign nationals, predominantly Brazilians.

Hal International School

Hal International School (grades K—9) is located in a wealthy expatriate community in a large urban city. This is a unique part of Japan where the buzz of English mixes with the sound of Japanese — where outside cafes are just as likely to be filled with fashionably dressed Westerners as they are with expensively clad Japanese. Tasteful art galleries, slick fashion buildings, and Italian outdoor cafes near the subway station let visitors share a taste of the neighborhood’s upper middle class lifestyle. But it is the beauty and tranquility of the residential area — away from the commotion of the commercial area near the station — that make it clear that this is an area reserved for the privileged. Behind tree-lined streets — rare in urban cities in Japan — one finds luxurious apartment buildings designed for foreign expatriates. Every time I visit this area I am amazed at the abundance of greenery and space right in the middle of an otherwise extremely densely populated city. On the way to Hal, in a huge park with a duck pond surrounded by cherry trees, which turn into pink clouds in the month of March, several Japanese and Western mothers were letting their toddlers play on the swings and slides, sharing the space but staying in their own groups. A few Filipino nannies were pushing the strollers of their Caucasian charges.