2015 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
The raising of a half in Japan and the UK
| Project/Area Number |
26580096
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| Research Institution | Tohoku University |
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Principal Investigator |
Barry Kavanagh 東北大学, 高度教養教育・学生支援機構, 講師 (80404820)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
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| Keywords | Child bilingualism / Linguistic relativity / Language acquisition / Child identity / Language education |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
14 families with bicultural children are now taking part in this research project as more families expressed interest in participating in this study. In addition, this year I also interviewed British and Japanese children and in total complied data from over 30 children across the four groups of
1. Japanese bi-cultural children in Japan, 2. Japanese bi-cultural children in the UK,
3. British children in the UK and 4. Japanese children in Japan.
Like last year I sent out questionnaires to the 14 families for the parents to fill in and this was followed up with interviews with the parents and the children themselves. As the research also examines the notion of linguistic relativity in bilinguals I also gave the 4 groups of children as outlined above picture matching and object classification tasking.
I presented findings thus far in at conferences in the UK, Korea, Hong Kong and Japan and have some conferences this year which I will present at which will explain the findings of year 27.
I have also visited some educational institutions such as Japanese language schools and societies in the UK to see how Japanese is used and perceived in the UK and interviewed some primary and secondary schoolteachers. I collected a lot of data and feel I can look at it from various angles to produce some interesting results. I have had 2 proceeding papers published and I have another paper under review.
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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
A couple of families dropped out of the study due to the fact that they were too busy to meet me but as new families joined this was not such a problem. When using families and children, as participants for a study like this scheduling can be difficult but luckily this year things went smoothly. The study continued where the research finished in the first year and the themes explored were expanded and looked at in more depth along with looking at some new research questions. A problem that I may encounter is that I would like to test the children second language ability and getting parents permission and actually administering the test itself to the children may prove to be challenging. In terms of the spending of the funds the majority of the money was spent on travel in order to do this research and also to present findings. Therefore the creation of questionnaires in English and Japanese, the data analysis was therefore all done by myself rather than with hired research assistants.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
With the data gathered from the first 2 years of the project I am putting the data together and writing papers which I will submit to peer reviewed journals. I will also present at international academic conferences. In the 3rd and final year of this project I will again be singing out new questionnaires, interviewing the families and children again along with activities for the children to do and hopefully I would like to test the childrens' second language acquisition ability through an external test.
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Research Products
(6 results)
