Investigating multiethnic students' learning of their heritage languages at Japanese universities

2023 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K00797
• Research Institution: Kanda University of International Studies
• 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)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 杉田 めぐみ 神田外語大学, 外国語学部, 准教授 (70366938)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-04-01 – 2024-03-31
• Keywords: heritage language / multiethnic / interviews / positioning

Outline of Annual Research Achievements

We continued our data collection by interviewing adolescent heritage language speakers. Our interviewees were college and vocational school students with roots in Vietnam, China, Argentina, and Peru.

Interviews with female students from China revealed that within the Chinese community, there is a lot of competition regarding the education of their children. Two speakers of heritage Spanish told us that they had enrolled in a heritage Spanish class at their university, but stopped taking the class when they saw that the students around them spoke Spanish fluently.

Thus, our data showed that multiethnic students are constantly positioning themselves against others not only in the Japanese context but also within the same ethnic group or language-speaking group.