Emergent Bilinguals and Educational Challenges at Public Schools in Japan

In Japan, where the number of foreign residents is increasing rapidly, how are migrant children whose mother tongue is not Japanese learning their mother tongue and Japanese at school? We call them CLD (Culturally Linguistically Diverse) children (Cummins, 1991). This book is the result of the first evidence-based, longitudinal eight-year research study in Japan in the field of language education for CLD children, an empirical study of the bilingual acquisition process involving the same group of CLD children with Chinese background over a six-year period. The book points out some of the difficulties facing Japanese public schools and presents the results of research on the bilingual performances of CLD children throughout the years. We explain the assessment tool developed and used for the research, originally based on the OBC (Oral Proficiency Assessment for Bilingual Children, CAJLE 2000). Later it became part of the DLA (Dialogic Language Assessment, 2014), which was officially developed by a team at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies as a project commissioned by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan). This book supports the transformative pedagogy articulated by Cummins (2016) to see emergent bilingual children as as…