2020 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Investigating multiethnic students' learning of their heritage languages at Japanese universities
| Project/Area Number |
19K00797
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| Research Institution | Kanda University of International Studies |
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Principal Investigator |
PARK Siwon 神田外語大学, グローバルリベラルアーツ学部, 教授 (00458639)
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| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
杉田 めぐみ 神田外語大学, 外国語学部, 准教授 (70366938)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2019-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | heritage language / higher education / interviews / identity / Vietnamese / Thai / Indonesian |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
The major goal for this year was to create social, educational, and linguistic profiles of the HL learners who participated in the previous interviews.
Following up on the previous interviews conducted in December 2019 through February 2020, we met those HL learners individually via Zoom and asked them further questions to look deeply into the relationship between their HL learning/use and their multiple identities. To be specific, we conducted interviews this year with five heritage language learners of three universities, who were majoring in Indonesian, Vietnamese and Thai languages. All of them are continuing participants for our project.
Out of five, two have already graduated from university and started working at a company. Both of them said they now have very few chances to make use of their HL skills at work. The other three participants are still enrolled in their undergraduate program majoring in their HL, and the amount of their HL use was almost the same as the previous year. This was mainly because their learning as well as social environment hadn't changed much. One notable fact related to their learning environment was that they had no chance to visit the country in which the target language is spoken (Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand) because of the spread of COVID-19, which might have affected their motivation for HL learning.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
Based on the research outcomes in the previous year, we continued our investigation concerning; 1) whether the participants' perceptions of learning the HLs have changed, and 2) to what extent the learning process was affected by the institutional participation as a major of the languages and also interactively affected their perception of themselves (i.e., identity) as HL learners.
We met the five participants via Zoom and interviewed them individually. Although we had initially planned to meet them face-to-face, it was not possible because of the spread of COVID-19. Despite the limitations on the method of our data collection, we were able to observe some changes in their attitudes toward HL learning and multiple identities related to their language use over the period of one year.
In addition to the continuing participants who are majoring in their HL at universities, we were able to contact two other HL speakers, both of whom are second generation Vietnamese immigrants (now naturalized as Japanese). They maintain their HL skills without receiving any formal training at university. By broadening the scope of our investigation, we would like to look more deeply into the landscape surrounding Vietnamese HL learners in the Japanese society.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
When the situations related to COVID-19 get better, we would like to meet each participant in person and continue our investigation by interviewing them on multiple occasions for a prolonged period of time.
As stated above, we have two new participants, who maintain their Vietnamese proficiencies without receiving any formal HL education. By broadening the scope of our investigation, we hope to further investigate the landscape surrounding Vietnamese HL learners in the Japanese society.
In the 3rd year, we would like to hold an international symposium on heritage language teaching/learning and invite a guest speaker from overseas.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Due to the spread of COVID-19, we were not able to attend domestic and oversea conferences and could not hold an international symposium on heritage language teaching/learning in higher education by inviting a speaker from overseas.
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