Janice Nakamura

Kanagawa University · Department of English

This study examines the challenges of minority language transmission in exogamous families in a society where linguistic and cultural homogeneity still prevails. Specifically, it investigates the macro and micro ideological influences that lead multilingual migrant mothers in Japan to speak Japanese to their children. Interview data with six Thai m...

Some bilingual children speak only one language despite being exposed to two languages from birth. When parents and children speak different languages to each other, their interactions become dual-lingual. This study examines how parental discourse strategies are used in dual-lingual interactions with receptive bilingual children. Naturalistic audi...

Mixed-ethnic children in Japan do not usually acquire the language of their non-Japanese parent. This study looks at their lost opportunity to acquire their minority parent’s language through a retrospective investigation of their language experiences from childhood to young adulthood. Transcripts of interviews with ten mixed-ethnic children (ages...

This chapter revisits Elizabeth Lanza's seminal ideas (1988, 1992, 1997b) on parents' use of discourse strategies with bilingual children. Her work showed how parents can affect two-year-olds' language choice through the way they interact with them. We add a developmental perspective by reviewing the application of Lanza's bilingual family interact...

COVID-19 has dramatically transformed Japan's linguistic landscape. This paper determines the types of COVID-19 store signs in Tokyo and Kanagawa and the extent to which they cater to the growing number of non-Japanese residents living in this highly populated urban region. Analysis of 293 COVID-19 signs shows that many are text-and-image monolingu...

Transnational educational migration is an emerging educational practice among East Asian families. This study investigates the language learning and socioemotional well-being of children who study abroad. Two Japanese siblings (ages 11 and 14) provided their insights on studying at an English-medium school in Malaysia. Data were collected over 1.5...

The growing emphasis on English in the education system in Japan has made English lessons one of the most popular extra-curricular activities for children. This qualitative study looks at how Japanese parents respond to language-in-education policy by examining their attitudes toward English and beliefs about extra-curricular English learning. Fift...

Simultaneous bilingual and bicultural children who are schooled in the dominant societal language can acquire literacy in their home language through home literacy practices and weekend school. Twenty-eight Japanese-English bilingual–bicultural children (ages 9 to 14) attending English weekend schools in Japan were assessed using the standardized T...

Bilingual children schooled in the dominant societal language can acquire home language literacy with home and community support. This paper reports on the development of English writing in 17 Japanese-English bilingual children (ages 9 to 13) who attended English weekend school in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. We assessed their English writi...

Some Japanese-English bilingual children who attend Japanese public schools learn to read and write in English in weekend schools. This study evaluates the English literacy levels of 31 Japanese-English bilingual children (ages nine to 15) who attend English weekend school in Tokyo or Yokohama. Their English writing ability was measured using a U.S...

This chapter revisits Elizabeth Lanza's seminal ideas (1988, 1992, 1997b) on parents' use of discourse strategies with bilingual children. Her work showed how parents can affect two-year-olds' language choice through the way they interact with them. We add a developmental perspective by reviewing the application of Lanza's bilingual family interact...

The popularity of English in early foreign language teaching is a global phenomenon. Parents and policymakers in Europe are eager to expose young children to a foreign language, which is usually English (De Houwer, 2015). Likewise, in Japan, English is the de facto foreign language subject in schools (Sakamoto, 2012). The introduction of English ed...

Impact belief is the conviction that parents have that they can affect their children’s language development (De Houwer, 1999). This paper investigates how parents’ impact belief is shaped and how it transpires into language management which supports the bilingual and biliterate development of children in exogamous families. Interviews with eight E...

This study examines the speech of a Thai mother who chose to use Japanese to her child from birth. Video data from ages 1;2 to 2;6 revealed that, despite the mother's avowal to speak Japanese, her native Thai and her L2, English, were occasionally used. She reverted to Thai most often and made use of Thai baby words and discourse particles which le...

Not all children who receive bilingual exposure from birth speak both of their languages. This paper examines receptive bilingualism in two bilingual children who reportedly speak Japanese to their Italian-speaking and English-speaking fathers. Analysis of audio recordings of parent-child interactions revealed that the two children produced some ut...

This study examines the relationship between caregivers' conversational styles in One-Person-One-Language (OPOL) settings and early bilingual development. In particular, it attempts to demonstrate that interrogative styles may have an impact on bilingual children's responsiveness in two language contexts. It is based on longitudinal data of a bilin...