A Linguistic Ethnography of Language Practices and Ideologies at two Japanese as a Heritage Language (JHL) Schools in England

Abstract

Increasing mobility, social diversification, and changing community structures require new educational responses to old challenges (Canagarajah, 2017). Migration into UK cities has established new social configurations and forged hybrid identities, leading to fresh interest in concepts of community and change (Myers & Grosvenor, 2011). This thesis presents a Linguistic Ethnography which investigated programmes of two Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) schools in England. The study highlights teachers’ and administrators’ ideological beliefs, and language practices in the classroom. JHL schools emerged at the end of the 1990s in the US and England as an alternative to hoshuko, supplementary schools sponsored by the Japanese government. Unlike hoshuko, JHL schools are locally financed, vary greatly in design, and determine their own programmes. Using the theoretical principles and methodological tools of Linguistic Ethnography, data were collected at North School and South School, which were selected from ten JHL schools I visited for my preliminary study. Data include fieldnotes, classroom audio recordings, interview recordings and other miscellaneous data sources. These were analysed using the tools of ethnographically-informed discourse analysis. Major findings are: 1) JHL teachers in the two JHL schools employed translanguaging as a pedagogic strategy in bridging conflicting but co-existing ideologies around language, literacy and culture. 2) In the two JHL schools, translanguaging pedagogy was an ideological and communicative response to superdiversity, requiring teachers’ competence and experience. 3) Education in the two schools was responsive to diversity and flexibility, but also to normative ‘kokugo’ Japanese-ness, and language separation. 4) ‘Conviviality’ acted as a stabilising mechanism in the tension between competing ideologies 5) Teachers’ and administrators’ constructions of the ‘heritage language’ made links not only to the past, but also to the future.