Development and maintenance of minority language literacy in Japanese-English bilingual children in Australia

要旨

Japanese--English bilingual children who grow up in Australia have two first languages: Japanese as a minority first language, and English as a majority first language.Reflecting the policy of reinforcement of economic ties between Japan and Australia, and the rise in the number of permanent and temporary residents, the number of such children of Japanese heritage is constantly increasing.Like many linguistic minority parents, the majority of Japanese parents have a serious concern regarding the development and maintenance of Japanese in their children who are being raised in Australia.However, few studies have addressed language maintenance issues relevant to this population, and no comprehensive study has been conducted on the long-term development or attrition ofliteracy in Japanese as a minority first language in contact settings.Moreover, there is an increasing recognition regarding the importance of developing minority language literacy and related registers for bilingual, cognitive, and academic development.For this reason, this study takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the development and maintenance of minority language literacy in Japanese-English bilingual children in Australia, focusing on the longitudinal development and maintenance of Japanese writing skills among school-age Japanese-English bilinguals ' (age 6-12) who reside outside the Japanese community and attend a weekend Japanese school in Sydney.More specifically, the longitudinal data were compared with cross-sectional data from 1) Japanese-English bilinguals who also learn Japanese at a weekend school in Sydney, but live in the Japanese community, 2) Japanese monolinguals who are schooled in Japanese in Sydney, and 3) Japanese monolinguals in Japan.The purpose of the study is to examine 1) the nature and development of literacy in Japanese as a minority first language in contact settings, 2) the influences of the socio-cultural and the individual contexts on minority language literacy, and 3) the interrelationship between the socio-cultural context and the individual context, in order to find a way to promote and achieve higher levels of literacy in a minority language.To this aim, both descriptive and statistical analyses were employed.With regard to the first issue, the findings of the cross-sectional analyses suggest that the bilinguals' Japanese is characterized by two features: development and transference.The longitudinal data of written Japanese was collected from ESL LOTE CUP AOA AOE LOR SES

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