2021 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 – 2023-03-31
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| Keywords | heritage language / higher education / interviews / identity / Vietnamese / Thai / Indonesian |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This year's primary goals of our project were to continue our data collection and to analyze the findings in order to investigate how HL learning and use are related to the construction of multiple identities of our participants. We continued our interviews with seven participants via Zoom. Same as last year, two of them had already graduated from universities and the rest were still students majoring in Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai.
We found that those two who were working had very few opportunities to use their heritage languages in their daily lives. This was mainly because their work at the companies had little connection to their HLs (Vietnamese and Thai respectively) and they both lived separately from their mothers, who are native speakers of their HL. Instead, one Vietnamese HL speaker was trying very hard to improve his English skills, expecting that it would help him find a better job in the near future.
Although our participants could be termed "Heritage Language Learners" based on their family background with their parents being native speakers of the target languages, we found English also plays a significant role when we consider their identities as language speakers.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
Although we are not able to meet our participants face-to-face, we have been successfully collecting the data for our investigation using Zoom and Google form. All of our participants are very cooperative for our research and we are grateful for them.
The only thing that didn't go as we had planned was attending and presenting our study at an international conference. In December 2021, we gave a presentation at a conference "Multilingual Learning: Policies and Practices" held in Krakow, Poland. Since we did not get permission from our university to travel abroad due to the spread of Covid-19, we gave an online presentation and received positive feedback from the audience.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
We will continue to interview our participants individually using Zoom.
Since this will be the last year for this research project, we will try to see how their identities have shifted for the past three years.
In November 2022, we plan to organize a symposium at our university on heritage language learning and teaching in higher education in Japan. We plan to invite Dr. Kimi Kondo at the University of Hawaii as the keynote speaker. We hope to share our findings with other interested researchers to gain understanding of theoretical as well as pedagogical issues related to HL learning and teaching.
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| Causes of Carryover |
For the past two years, we were unable to hold a symposium on heritage language learning and teaching due to the pandemic of Covid-19. This year, in 2022, we plan to hold the symposium and invite a plenary speaker from the University of Hawaii for an online talk.
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