Constructing the Heritage Language Learner: Knowledge, Power and New Subjectivities 9781614512837, 9781614513995

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Neriko Musha Doerr and Kiri Lee Constructing the Heritage Language Learner

Contributions to the Sociology of Language

Edited by Joshua A. Fishman Ofelia García

Volume 103

Neriko Musha Doerr and Kiri Lee

Constructing the Heritage Language Learner Knowledge, Power, and New Subjectivities

ISBN 978-1-61451-399-5 e-ISBN 978-1-934078-11-2 ISSN 1861-0676 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 6 2013 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin Cover image: sculpies/shutterstock Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

To Hanako, Joey, Mio, and Shū, our “heritage language” speakers

Acknowledgments This volume is a product of the generosity of others – students who welcomed us to their classrooms with wide smiles and shared their perceptions and ideas in interviews; parents who allowed us glimpses into their family’s past, present, and future through interviews; teachers who kindly opened their classrooms to us for observation and shared their thoughts on teaching and classroom dynamics; administrators who supported us by granting permission to carry out this research, providing us with information, and sharing their visions. This book could not have existed without their gracious participation in our research. Being part of the Jackson Japanese Language School ourselves, first as parents of students and secondarily as a substitute teacher (Doerr) and an administrator (Lee), we shared the aspirations, worries, and doubts common to the parents, teachers, and administrators we interviewed. Over time, we have learned much about both the construction of heritage language learners via schooling and the decisions of parents who send their children to weekend schools to learn non-mainstream languages. We conducted our research both within and outside of this language school community. We wish to express our gratitude to our fellow researchers. Their insightful, constructive, encouraging comments contributed to the development of this volume, which includes revised versions of arguments from our previous conference presentations and journal articles. We thank such teachers and friends – John Davis, Yuri Kumagai, Laura Miller, Yuko Okubo, Shinji Sato, Taku Suzuki, Ayako Takamori, and Michiyo Takato – as well as anonymous reviewers for Mouton de Gruyter. We thank Jaime Taber for the final copyediting. Most of all, we are grateful to Christopher Richard Doerr and Paul Schalow for their constant patience, love, and support, not to mention their late nights copyediting earlier drafts. All responsibility for the material discussed here remains our own.

Table of contents Acknowledgments 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.6.1 1.6.2 1.6.3 1.7 1.8 2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.6.1

v

Introduction: The heritage language learner? 1 The heritage language learner? 1 Research on heritage language learners 3 Weekend Japanese language schools in the United States 5 Kokugo vs. keishōgo education and the “heritage language effect” 6 Analyzing performative construction of the heritage language learner 9 Construction of the heritage language learner 11 Constructing the heritage language learner as an object of investigation 11 Constructing heritage language learners through schooling: Two imaginings, two modes of governmentality 12 Constructing heritage language learners by giving them meanings 14 On collaboration 15 The structure of the book 17 An emerging field of investigation: Construction of the heritage language learner as a new object of study 19 A new term on the block 19 Shifts in language policies in the United States 20 Emergence of the term “heritage language” in the United States 22 Self-esteem-based definition of the heritage language learner Linguistic-proficiency-based definition of the heritage language learner 25 Interconnection, disjuncture, and critique 26 Contested fields of research: Defining the heritage language learner 28 Knowledge and power 28 Reification of language, linguistic community, and language speakers: The heritage language effect 29 Reifying language and linguistic community 29

23

x 2.6.1.1 2.6.1.2 2.6.1.3 2.6.2 2.6.2.1 2.6.2.2 2.6.2.3 2.6.2.4 2.7 3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.4.1 4.4.2 4.4.3 4.5

5 5.1 5.2

Table of contents

Language and nation-states 30 Standardization 33 Linguistics 36 Reifying the language speaker 38 The native speaker concept 39 Alternative notions: English as a lingua franca 41 Alternative labels 42 Contestations 43 Construction of the heritage language through research Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School Jackson Japanese Language School 45 The Jackson Course 48 JJLS, heritage language research, and keishōgo vs. heritage language 52 Ethnographic fieldwork at JJLS and subjectivities of the authors 57 Collecting data 59

43 45

Betwixt and between Japanese and the heritage language learner of Japanese 63 Transplanted virtual “Japan”, or Japanese school for the local community? 63 Japanese government policies on hoshūkō 65 Adapting to a changing student body at the local level 68 The road JJLS took 70 Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda: Founding members and local administrators 70 Lee: Principal of the second unit, 2004–2012 74 MEXT-sent principals 76 Construction of “Japanese” students and “heritage language learners of Japanese” 78 Designing the heritage language learner: Modes of governmentality in the classroom 81 Intended modes of governmentality in hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course 81 Visibility and technique 81

Table of contents

5.2.1 5.2.2 5.3 5.4 5.4.1 5.4.2 5.4.3 5.4.4 5.4.5 5.5 6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.3.1 6.3.1.1 6.3.2 6.3.2.1 6.3.2.2 6.3.2.3 6.3.3 6.3.3.1 6.4 6.4.1 6.4.2 6.4.3 6.5 6.5.1 6.5.2

xi

Learning about Takamura Kōtarō in hoshūkō-bu: The subjectcentered approach 86 Learning about John Manjirō and beyond in the Jackson Course: The holistic approach 88 Knowledge 90 Subjectivities 91 On supporting Japan’s future 91 A hoshūkō-bu teacher’s view 92 On the voting age 93 On abortion in Korea and other countries 94 A Jackson Course teacher’s view 95 Molding heritage language learners 96 98 Defining the heritage language learner Practices and perceptions 98 Carving out legitimacy: The Jackson Course administrators and MEXT officials 99 Deciding (not) to join the Jackson Course: Cases of five students 100 “Rescued students” 101 Sasha: A Jackson Course old-timer 101 “Potential traversers” 103 Anne: Staying in hoshūkō-bu 104 Mayumi: Moved from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course after 6th grade 105 Junko: Regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track class 106 “System outsiders” 110 Martin: Starting JJLS in the Jackson Course 110 One classroom, two perceptions, two modes of governmentality 113 Mayumi: Staying in the Jackson Course 113 Junko: Moving back to hoshūkō-bu from the Jackson Course 114 Perceptions and experienced governmentality 115 Legitimacy, meanings, and modes of governmentality 117 Competing mentalities of governmentality and invested meanings 117 Creation of legitimacy and schooling 118

xii 7

Table of contents

7.6 7.7 7.8

Shifting frames of reference: JJLS, AP, heading college, and construction of the Japanese-as-a-heritage-language learner 120 What makes one continue learning a heritage language 120 Minority language education and the mainstream educational system 122 Japanese language in US mainstream education 123 Students’ and parents’ experiences 123 Mayumi: After taking AP examination, left JJLS right before graduation 124 Jake: Left JJLS after 8th grade 127 Anne: Left JJLS after middle school but took AP Japanese examination 131 Changing motivations and the mainstream education system 134 Construction of subjects and two frames of reference 136 The AP Japanese examination as interface 137 Conclusion 138

8 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

139 Adjusting the Jackson Course Imagining and accommodating heritage language learners Responding to parents’ perceptions 139 Responding to students’ lives in the United States 143 Responding to the MEXT’s positions 143 Implications 144

9 9.1 9.2 9.3

146 Implications and departure Construction of the heritage language learner 146 Theoretical implications 146 Practical implications of administrator involvement in research 148 Suggestions following from this study’s findings 150 Heritage as a new imagining 155

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.4.1 7.4.2 7.4.3 7.5

9.4 9.5

Appendix 1: Appendix 2: Appendix 3: Appendix 4: Appendix 5:

157 First Questionnaires for Parents Second Questionnaires for Parents 160 First Questionnaires for Students 163 Second Questionnaires for Students 165 Questionnaires for Teachers 167

139

Table of contents

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Appendix 6: Questionnaires for Parents of Students Who Were Leaving or Had Left JJLS 169 Appendix 7: Questionnaires for Students Who Were Leaving or Had Left JJLS 170 Appendix 8: Summary of Student Interviews and Profiles 171 Appendix 9: Glossary of Japanese Terms 174 175 References Index 187

1 Introduction: The heritage language learner? 1.1 The heritage language learner? “It’s strange to say ‘I cannot speak Japanese but I am Japanese’,” said Anne,1 who explained that she goes to a weekend Japanese language school to learn Japanese language and culture so that she can say “I can speak Japanese” and “I have two cultures”. Anne did not view herself as a Japanese heritage language (keishōgo 継承語) learner and thus felt she needed to be in a program for “native” Japanese students living in the United States. Mayumi, in contrast, felt such a program for “native” Japanese speakers “is hard for me to understand because I’m not advanced in Japanese [. . .] Japanese is their [sojourner students from Japan] native language and it comes naturally to them. For me, Japanese is my second language and it takes a while to think in Japanese [. . .] In regular [American] school, I know all the language and I can form questions better”. She moved to a program for students brought up in the United States because teachers there “might explain things better”. She viewed herself as a Japanese heritage language learner. Despite their similar family background, Anne and Mayumi, 6th graders at a weekend Japanese language school in the northeastern United States, had diverging views on their positions and school programs. Both were born and raised in the United States, each has one “Japanese” and one “American” parent, and both have attended the same Japanese language school since preschool. However, Anne refused to see herself as Japanese heritage language learner, whereas Mayumi saw herself as a heritage language learner. Despite this difference between the two students’ perceptions, many heritage language education researchers consider both Anne and Mayumi to be heritage language learners because they both grew up speaking a minority language – Japanese – at home in the United States (see Carreira 2004; Valdés 2001). For many researchers, meanwhile, the program designed for “native speakers” of Japanese that Anne stayed in and the program designed for heritage speakers of Japanese that Mayumi moved to both qualify as heritage language programs because they both taught a minority language in the United States (Carreira 2004; Valdés 2001). Are Anne and Mayumi heritage language learners, or are they not? Are these programs heritage language programs, or are they not? Who decides, and in what context and for what purpose? Why are there different views? What might 1 All names in this volume are aliases.

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Introduction: The heritage language learner?

we do with these different views? What are the effects of this contestation over the meaning of heritage language? What does this tell us about the notion of heritage language and its effects? In this volume, we ask these questions and investigate the ways “heritage language learners”2 are constructed, contested, and negotiated as well as the effects of calling someone a heritage language leaner – what we call the “heritage language effect”. This book is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out from February 2007 to March 2011 at a weekend Japanese language school in the northeastern United States. This school is unique in its dual structure: within it, there coexist a Japanese government–supported program designed for sojourners who are “native speakers” of Japanese, and a locally designed program for English/ Japanese bilingual heritage language learners. Despite administrators’ intentions, some students and parents viewed the difference between the programs as tracking, with the latter being the dropouts’ class; as difference in legitimacy, with the latter being less legitimate; or as difference in how Japanese its students are, with the latter being less so. This setup then made identifying oneself or someone else as a heritage language learner a conscious process of negotiating what constitutes “Japanese language proficiency” and a legitimate way to learn Japanese language, who is “Japanese”, and what it means to call a language one’s “native” or “heritage” language. What each program is for was also contested. Existing research on heritage language education, a relatively new field of investigation, rarely addresses such negotiation and construction. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notions of knowledge and power, and Mitchell Dean’s reworking of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, we investigate the construction of heritage language learners by (1) researchers who identify and seek knowledge about heritage language learners; (2) government officials, school administrators, and teachers who design programs and mold behavior, desire, and available subject positions differently for “native speakers” and heritage language learners in the classroom; and (3) students and parents who choose, resist, negotiate, and contest the newly available subject position of heritage language learners, reflecting their view of what constitutes legitimate “Japanese language”, relationship to Japan as the (ancestral) homeland, future aspirations, family background, linguistic proficiency in Japanese, and position in classroom dynamics. We thus analyze heritage language learners as (1) a new object of investigation for researchers, (2) a new target for whom language programs are established, and (3) a new subject position constructed in a context of increas2 As “heritage language learner” is a constructed notion under contestation and negotiation rather than an agreed-upon category of individuals, the term heritage language learner ought to be in quotation marks. However, for the sake of readability, the quotation marks around the term are omitted throughout this book.

Research on heritage language learners

3

ing hope and anxiety about a globalizing world. That is, this volume is not about language education per se but about social practices that construct new subjectivities in the name of language education. What we investigate then is not whether or not one is a heritage language learner but how one came to be considered a heritage language learner and what are the effects of being considered so: the “heritage language effect”. In what follows, we review existing research on heritage language education, give some background on Japanese language schools in the United States and the notions of kokugo 国語 (national language/language art) and keishōgo (heritage language), explain the analytical tools we use in this volume, discuss three ways heritage language learners are constructed corresponding to the chapters in this volume, describe the collaborative process of this research, and summarize this volume’s structure.

1.2 Research on heritage language learners Studies about heritage language learners derive from two fields of research. One is what once was called maintenance bilingual education – retaining minority languages to empower the minority language communities and secure students’ self-esteem. For example, Joshua Fishman (2001: 95) argues that promoting heritage language proficiency “will not only give us more individuals proficient in these languages, it will also dignify our country’s heritage language communities and the cultural and religious values that their languages represent” (also see Cho 2000; Moses 2000). For Fishman, promoting minority languages – what he calls “Reversing Language Shift (RLS)” – is about “cultural reconstruction and for greater cultural-self-regulation” (Fishman 1991: 17). Regarding the self-esteem of minority language speakers, reports indicate that early heritage language education can positively impact the personal and collective selfesteem of minority language students. Because school acts to legitimize the dominant group’s cultural arbitraries (including language) and devalue minority groups’ knowledge (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977), the use of the heritage language (i.e., minority language) as the medium of instruction at school helps elevate the value and status of the heritage language and its speakers (Cho 2000; Moses 2000; Otcu 2010a, 2010b; Write and Taylor 1995). We rename this field of study the self-esteem approach.3 3 This line of research developed to focus more on the sense of self of heritage language leaners in general, spawning research on individuals’ shifting connections to the language (Creese et al. 2006; Curdt-Christiansen 2006; 2008; He 2006; Otcu 2010a; 2010b) or to other speakers (Jo 2001; Martinez 2003; Oriyama 2010; Valdés 1981).

4

Introduction: The heritage language learner?

Another field of heritage language research focuses on individuals’ linguistic proficiency and on positioning them within a continuum from “native speaker” to “foreign language learner”. It grew out of a concern in the foreign language classroom about students who, though their family background provided them with more knowledge about the language than first-time learners had, were still less proficient than “native” speakers. The notion of heritage language learner was introduced to cater to their specific needs (Campbell and Peyton 1988; Chevalier 2004; Douglas 2005; Draper and Hicks 2000; Kanno et al. 2008; Kondo-Brown 2003), and research in this field treats pedagogical issues specific to heritage language learners, such as curriculum and assessment (e.g., KondoBrown and Brown 2008). We call this the linguistic-proficiency approach. While the latter approach focuses on pedagogical issues, the former is based on an understanding that language education is really about relations of dominance (Bourdieu 1991; Cummins 2001; Fishman 1991; Heller 2003). Relations of dominance in society are often reflected in the school culture, which subordinates the experience, knowledge, and beliefs of minority cultures (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Cummins 2001; Giroux 1989; Giroux and McLaren 1989). Even when the minority language is taught, the language practices are often placed in the matrix of the dominant language, sending a covert message about the inferior and marked status of the minority language, overriding overt support for the minority language, and perpetuating the hierarchy between languages as well as their speakers (Meek and Messing 2007). Such studies, however, view individuals’ linguistic identification as stable and static and tend to start with the assumption that who heritage language learners are is a never-changing, objective fact, as mentioned. They also assume and further perpetuate reified views of the language, linguistic community, and language speaker. Existing theories have devoted little attention to ethnographic investigation of individuals’ perceptions of what the term heritage language learners means, how individuals come to see themselves as heritage language learners, and how it affects daily interactions as well as institutional settings.4 This volume shows diverse ways individuals’ relations to a language as a “heritage language” are established, negotiated, and subverted by schooling processes that highlight differences in students’ family backgrounds, future aspirations, linguistic proficiency, and positionalities.

4 While analysis of such processes via tracking has been much discussed in education research (Mehan, Hertweck, and Meihls 1986; Oakes 1985), little space has been devoted to the ways schooling processes construct heritage language learners in terms of their sense of self and development of linguistic proficiency.

Weekend Japanese language schools in the United States

5

1.3 Weekend Japanese language schools in the United States Japanese language instruction for children of Japanese immigrants in the United States began in Hawaii in the 1890s, shortly after Japanese immigration to the United States started. However, the type of schools discussed in this volume, hoshūkō 補習校,5 were not established until the early 1960s, when Japan’s economic development led to increasing numbers of companies sending employees and their families to the United States for short-term assignments, thus creating a need for the schools (Sato 1997). As of October 2012, there were seventy-eight hoshūkō (weekend supplementary Japanese language schools approved by the Japanese government) in the United States.6 These schools provide “Japanese” children in the 1st to 9th grades (the compulsory period of education in Japan for students aged 6 to 15) who attend local or international schools during the week with part of the education they would have received in Japanese compulsory education, using Japanese government–certified textbooks and curricula based on guidelines – the Course of Study – established by the Japanese government. The schools aim to enable these children to continue in the Japanese school system upon their return to Japan (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology [hereafter MEXT] 2008). The main subject is kokugo (language arts/ Japanese national language). Some schools offer mathematics, science, and social studies in addition to kokugo.7 Hoshūkō often offer preschool/kindergarten programs for children planning to enroll in hoshūkō, as well as high school programs for hoshūkō graduates. The Japanese government endeavors to provide children of Japanese citizens overseas with access to part of its compulsory education by subsidizing some school expenses8 and deploying some teachers to hoshūkō with more than 100 “Japanese” students. These efforts accord with Article 26 of the Japanese Constitution, which guarantees free compulsory education for Japanese children between the ages of 6 and 15 (MEXT 2008). Since the 1990s, these hoshūkō have accommodated a growing diversity of students. To cater to students whose aims in studying Japanese differ from the purpose of the hoshūkō, keishōgo (heritage language) programs were developed in some US cities (Chinen 2004; Douglas 2005).

5 Because the Japanese language does not pluralize nouns, we follow that convention throughout this volume. 6 http://www.joes.or.jp/g-kaigai/gaikoku03.html. Accessed 12 November 2011. 7 http://www.joes.or.jp/g-kaigai/gaikoku03.html. Accessed 4 October 2012. 8 The grants come from both the MEXT and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) of Japan.

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Introduction: The heritage language learner?

1.4 Kokugo vs. keishōgo education and the “heritage language effect” Kokugo and keishōgo education differ in two ways. First, they have different political connotations, as the former is strongly linked to Japan’s nation-building. In the nineteenth century, in line with the “one nation, one language” model, the Meiji administration chose a linguistic variety used by educated people in its capital city, Tokyo, as a standard language and imposed it on Japan’s citizens as the only legitimate one through compulsory kokugo education in an effort to create a homogeneous “Japanese” nation (Lee 1996; Yasuda 2003). Toshiaki Yasuda thus defines kokugo as “one of the institutions used to create and unify a nation in modern nation-states” (Yasuda 2003: 22; our translation). Kokugo education, like other subjects taught in the compulsory education in Japan, currently follows the Course of Study set by MEXT and uses MEXT-certified textbooks. Kokugo can be translated as “national language” or “language art”. This convergence of nationhood and education is at the heart of the notion of kokugo. Keishōgo education does not link to the nation-state in this way and is not required to follow the MEXT Course of Study or use MEXT-certified textbooks. Thus, keishōgo provides a space outside the nation-state yet is linked to Japan. Second, kokugo and keishōgo education differ in the expectations and aims of students’ linguistic proficiency. While kokugo education presupposes full attainment of daily use of the target language – what Cummins ([1996] 2001) calls “Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS)”9 – keishōgo may not. Based on this assumption, kokugo education provides education in academic Japanese, or what Cummins (2001) calls “Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP)”.10 Kokugo education sets rigid goals at each grade level, including the kanji 漢字 (Chinese characters) to be learned in each grade. Keishōgo education also aims at attainment of CALP, but a more flexible time frame than that designated in kokugo education accommodates its students’ considerable individual differences in BICS11 (Kondo-Brown 2003).

9 Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) are a set of communication skills facilitating the day-to-day or practical oral communication needed to interact socially with other people (Cummins 2001). 10 Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) refers to language skills needed to succeed in formal academic learning, including listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content. Attained through the language of the classroom, CALP requires the learner to understand abstract ideas, rely on fewer nonverbal cues, and master more complex structure, while BICS can be acquired through face-to-face conversation dealing with simply structured everyday language (Cummins 2001). 11 Language instruction that does not expect BICS of students is called Nihongo (Japanese-asa-foreign-language) education.

Kokugo vs. keishōgo education and the “heritage language effect”

7

It should be noted that the practice of calling a language either one’s “national” or “heritage” language is not neutral or automatic but often politically loaded, affecting relationships with one’s own linguistic practices, other individuals, linguistic citizenship, and the imagined (ancestral) homeland12 (Doerr 2010; Whiteside 2009). In recent studies, heritage is understood as multivocal processes that transform relationships between individuals and what they do, awakening a meta-cultural awareness of their daily acts. For example, once playing a card game like karuta comes to be considered as a part of passing on Japanese heritage, the card game is approached differently, as practicing and passing on “Japanese heritage”. Heritage is thus better conceptualized as a practice (of considering and treating karuta as heritage) than as an artifact (the karuta cards themselves). Such heritage interventions change how people understand their culture, themselves, and the fundamental conditions for cultural production and reproduction (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006; Smith 2006). This volume shows that choosing to call a language either one’s national or heritage language is such a practice.13 This effect of calling a language one’s heritage is little addressed in existing studies of heritage language education, which have relied on the premise that the heritage language learner already exists, as mentioned. The heritage language learner is often defined without critical discussion of what it means to suggest a definition. The central topic in defining the heritage language learner is to achieve more “accurate” definition, as will be discussed further in Chapter 2. In this volume, instead of asking what the best definition of the heritage language learner is, we suggest exploring the “heritage language effect” – the ways individuals’ actions and sense of self are affected by being called a “heritage language” learner – drawing on the notion of heritage practice as well as Foucault’s idea of truth effect. Foucault argues: Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (Foucault 1972: 131)

12 Other scholars discuss similar ambiguities regarding “mother tongue”, which can be defined as: (1) the language(s) one learns first; (2) the language(s) one knows best; (3) the language(s) one uses most; or (4) the language(s) one identifies with (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1989). See Chapter 2 for more discussion. 13 Diverse ways to inherit Japaneseness understood in this framework were analyzed in Doerr and Lee (2010).

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Introduction: The heritage language learner?

Foucault thus points us to “seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false” (1972: 118). Following this lead, some researchers shift their attention to such truth effects. Regarding the notion of English-as-an-International-Language, Alastair Pennycook urges us to analyze “language effects” – the effects of the existence of the notion of English-as-an-International-Language, a notion produced by “A range of interested industries, from linguists to educationalists, from policy makers to publishers” (Pennycook 2007: 110–112). Regarding the notion of the “native speaker”, Neriko Doerr (2009b) argues that instead of asking whether the category of the “native speaker” corresponds to some empirical reality, one should aim to explore the “native speaker effect”: the ways individuals’ activities are affected by the belief in a “native/non-native speaker” binary distinction. Likewise, based on ethnographic research, this volume illustrates the “heritage language effect”. Weekend Japanese language schools in the United States offer fertile ground for analyzing what it means to call someone a heritage language learner as well as to call one’s language a heritage language because of the existence of two types of education, one identified as kokugo (designed for “native speakers” learning the national language)14 and one, keishōgo (translated as “heritage language”). A conventional definition of the heritage language learner would lump all types of learners growing up in Japanese-speaking homes in the United States into the category of heritage language learner.15 In this context, debates around heritage language education raise questions about what it means to be “Japanese”, how knowing “the Japanese language” relates to “being Japanese”, and who has the right to certify that someone knows the Japanese language.

14 One important factor is the Japanese government’s involvement in providing kokugo education and, in response to this involvement, the decision some alternative keishōgo programs take to sever their ties with the Japanese government. Most non-Japanese heritage language schools in the United States are run by local communities without much formal involvement of the “homeland” government (Fishman 2001). There are some exceptions, such as Turkey (Otcu 2010a; 2010b) and China (Curdt-Christiansen 2006). However, the government involvement is much less in these cases compared to that of Japan, whose government provides the same Course of Study guideline used in schools in Japan as well as some administrators, teachers, and grants. The history of the development of this system will be detailed in Chapter 3. 15 The term heritage language is used inconsistently among Japanese-language education researchers and practitioners. Some researchers, especially when they write in English, call both kokugo and keishōgo education “heritage language education” (Chinen and Tucker 2005; Douglas 2005). Others, especially when writing in Japanese, contrast keishōgo with kokugo education (Nakajima 2010; Sasaki 2010).

Analyzing performative construction of the heritage language learner

9

As mentioned above, our research site, Jackson Japanese Language School (JJLS), offers both a conventional Japanese government–supported kokugo program called hoshūkō-bu16, and its own keishōgo program called the Jackson Course independent of this government support. In this volume, we show the rivalry for legitimacy between these two kinds of programs and its effects on students and parents.

1.5 Analyzing performative construction of the heritage language learner Throughout this book, we show that the construction of heritage language learners is a contested process, involving competing regimes of difference into whose categories students are interpellated. Regimes of difference are systems of categories in which an item is defined in relation to another item with which it is contrasted. The notion of regime of difference is similar to what others have called the structure of difference (Wilk 1995), chain of signification (Hall 1985), schemata of classification (Bourdieu 1989), schemata of co-figuration (Sakai 1997), or matrix of difference (Butler 1993). These notions suggest a category is created in relation to that which it is not. Talking about one’s subjectivity triggers the understanding of the others from whom one is differentiated (Hall 1996). Through regimes of difference, students’ subjectivities become intelligible to others as well as to themselves. These subjectivities guide the students’ dreams of the future, create self-fulfilling prophecies, and steer the camaraderie they form with others. Several competing regimes of difference involve heritage language learners: mainstream English monolingual Americans vs. multi/bilingual heritage language learners; foreign language learners vs. heritage language learners; native speakers vs. heritage language learners; individuals with single heritage vs. individuals with multiple heritages; and, in terms of linguistic proficiency, top-track vs. lower-track students (the latter being an alternative notion of heritage language learners). The notion of regime in the “regime of difference” emphasizes the relations of dominance that underlie acceptance of a certain regime of difference. Pierre Bourdieu (1989) argues that to impose schemata of classification (i.e., regimes of difference) favorable to oneself is to reproduce one’s domination over others. In other words, it is to impose one’s vision (and division) of the world on others. Thus, it is the schemata of classification that are at stake in political struggle 16 To differentiate the JJLS setup from other hoshūkō that designate entire schools, we use the term “hoshūkō-bu” (hoshūkō section) to indicate a section within a school.

10

Introduction: The heritage language learner?

(Bourdieu 1989). The term regime emphasizes this aspect. The notion of regime in the “regime of difference”, then, allows us to analyze diverse ways in which individuals relate to regimes of difference – resistance, strategic submission, disruption, acceptance, and so forth (see Doerr 2009d). A regime of difference, like the Althusserian concept of ideology (Althusser 1971), constitutes concrete individuals as subjects by hailing or interpellating them: they are positioned or interpellated into categories that consequently structure their practices. In turn, individuals’ behavior and language articulate the perceived differences among people, whereby ideology manifests itself in concrete categories of people (Althusser 1971). Here, an individual is a subject in a double sense: on the one hand subjected to regimes of difference by being hailed or interpellated by them, yet on the other having a sense of free will and acting as a subject who is the author of, and responsible for, his or her actions. That is, individuals are interpellated as subjects who subject themselves “freely” to a regime of difference (Althusser 1971; also see Hall 1985). Nevertheless, unlike Althusser, we do not take individuals to be always already a subject or inescapably interpellated. As Hervé Varenne and Mary Cotter (2006) suggest, individuals may “go along” with a regime of difference even when they sense contradictions. Others believe that subjects are constituted by contradictory interpellations throughout their life (thus creating a multiplicity of subject positions within a subject), and that individuals with diverse histories are interpellated differently by the same ideology (Smith 1988). While regimes of difference are often institutionally produced, they are also discursively (re)produced without clear agencies to promote them. Not only does this book trace processes and effects of institutionally constructed regimes of difference materialized through two different programs with specific imaginings about their target students (Chapter 4) and specific modes of governmentality that differentiate those in the regime of difference (Chapter 5). It also traces how regimes of difference are discursively constructed – by MEXT officials, school administrators, teachers, parents, and students themselves through giving meaning to difference, (Chapter 6) and by students comparing themselves to Americans with proficiency in Japanese (Chapter 7). We also show how this meaning-making affects institutional settings, creating a loop of influence (Chapter 8). This discursive construction of regimes of difference is done performatively.17 Judith Butler argues that, by being cited as the norm, a certain matrix (or regime) 17 Butler (1993: 2) uses the term performativity “not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains”.

Construction of the heritage language learner

11

of difference becomes naturalized and materialized as meaningful sets of categories by which to classify people (Butler 1993). For example, the practice of categorizing individuals according to nationality cites such a categorization as the norm. It then marginalizes those whose ancestry includes two nationalities and/or who have lived in several countries by positioning them in an in-between category (e.g., “half”, “double”, “hybrid”) rather than a full-fledged category of being in itself (e.g., mestizo). This volume examines performative citations of various regimes of difference that construct the heritage language learner in diverse ways.

1.6 Construction of the heritage language learner We examine three interconnected ways heritage language learners are constructed: (1) by researchers identifying and defining heritage language learners as new objects of investigation; (2) by school programs aimed at serving heritage language learners by governing and molding students in certain ways; and (3) by negotiation in giving meaning to certain programs and students.

1.6.1 Constructing the heritage language learner as an object of investigation In this volume, we look at the ways researchers create heritage language learners by turning what used to be called “bilingual speakers” or “community language learners” into “heritage language learners”, producing a new object of research and a new field of investigation. Michel Foucault (1977) argues that, in the formation of the field of knowledge via development of an array of new institutions (e.g., schools, hospitals, and reformatories) and academic disciplines (e.g., pedagogy, psychology, psychiatry, and criminology) from the eighteenth century, a multiplicity of power relations were constituted between those who wished to know by using the newly developed technology of knowledge, and those who became the object of knowledge – students, delinquents, and criminals (also see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982). The historical background was liberalism. In its efforts to govern new objects of government – markets, civil society, and citizens – liberalism gave birth to a new authority that arises from a claim to knowledge: “experts”. Experts were needed to resolve the dilemma of government in liberalism – the contradiction between the need to “govern in the interest of morality and order, and the need to restrict government interest of liberty and economy” (Rose 1996: 39). Here, relations of dominance formed between those who came to acquire knowledge and those who become the object of that knowledge.

12

Introduction: The heritage language learner?

Echoing this development of a new research field constituting power relations between researchers and the objects of their research, studies in the United States in the 1990s positioned heritage language learners as an object of study. This new field of research is often lauded as public support for language maintenance of linguistically minority communities in the era of globalization (Peyton et al. 2001). However, following Foucault’s take on knowledge and power, we regard this new field of research as an indicator of a rising concern and desire to manage minority linguistic communities at a time of anxiety over the global flow of immigrants, job opportunities, and ideologies. Chapter 2 of this book surveys existing researches on heritage language learners and highlights this process of targeted construction – i.e., naming, marking, and defining – of heritage language learners out of language learners formerly called otherwise. It also points out some “heritage language effects”: perpetuation of reified notions of language, linguistic community, and language speakers.

1.6.2 Constructing heritage language learners through schooling: Two imaginings, two modes of governmentality We also focus on the ways the schooling process constructs heritage language learners. When setting up a school, school administrators imagine what kinds of students they are serving. Absent a consensus, especially on two programs with different aims, struggles to clarify each program’s target students result in constructing types of students each program caters to. Chapter 4 of this volume illustrates this process. In JJLS, establishment of the Jackson Course independent of the MEXT Course of Study prompted negotiation over the amount of responsibility the MEXT should provide, especially the extent of involvement by a MEXT-sent principal. The involvement of a MEXT-sent principal, symbolizing the use of Japan’s tax money, came to be restricted to hoshūkō-bu only, constructing hoshūkō-bu-students as “Japanese” worthy of his involvement, and the Jackson Course students as not-so-Japanese and thus not deserving his involvement. The programs were then designed accordingly, with specific modes of governmentality. Foucault argues that schools in the eighteenth century governed students by the modes of governmentality of discipline, which “compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogeneizes, and excludes [students]. In short, it normalizes [them]” (Foucault 1977: 183). The technique of examination combines this normalizing judgment with observation of hierarchy (Foucault 1977). Some aspects of such a mode of governmentality still exist in practice at schools (Gore 1998; Green 1998).

Construction of the heritage language learner

13

Governmentality concerns “how to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others” (Foucault 1991: 87). Foucault (1991) uses the notion of governmentality in two ways (Dean 1999; Gordon 1991; Rose 1996). First, it is a way to analyze the development of the “art of government”, begun in sixteenthcentury Europe when feudalism began to give way to territorially-based nationstates and the religious Reformation and Counter-Reformation made the question of how to govern the soul a topic of discussion. Second, Foucault uses government, as Mitchell Dean describes it, as “any more or less calculated and rational activity, undertaken by a multiplicity of authorities and agencies, employing a variety of techniques and forms of knowledge, that seeks to shape conduct by working through our desire, aspirations, interests and beliefs, for definite but shifting ends and with a diverse set of relatively unpredictable consequences, effects and outcomes” (Dean 1999: 11). It is “practices that try to shape, sculpt, mobilize, and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles of individuals and groups” (Dean 1999: 12). Dean (1999) expands on the second notion of governmentality and analyzes various acts that involve “the attempt to shape rationally human conduct” (Dean 1999: 11) as a deployment of a mode of governmentality. While not all acts are acts of governing, some acts that may not appear to govern actually are, if they aim at molding human conduct. For example, even practices aimed at the emancipation of certain groups take the form of molding people’s actions, thus rendering them unable to escape the relations of dominance (Dean 1999; Foucault 1991). We draw on Dean’s emphasis on the second notion of governmentality to analyze practices at the Japanese language school. In Dean’s view, many intermeshing modes of government coexist within a society. In the domain of schooling, teachers, peers, and students themselves (self-) govern students by recognizing, marking, and correcting mistakes that contrast with the “ideal” in the practices of examination, class presentation, worksheets, and so forth (Foucault 1977; Gore 1998; Green 1998). In the domain of health care, modes of governmentality are deployed by those with “somatic expertise” – doctors, health-care workers, therapists, nutritionists, fitness experts, fertility counselors, etc. – who identify, prevent, and heal sickness (Ong 2003; Rose 2007). In the domain of language, not only teachers of language arts (Sato & Kataoka 2008; Yasuda 2003), second or foreign languages (Doerr 2009c), or accent-reduction courses (Lippi-Green 1997), but also individuals in daily interactions (Doerr 2009a, 2009c; Rampton 1995) and employers hiring “native” over “non-native” speakers (Braine 1999) identify “accents” or “mistakes” in language usage and make them consequential, urging standardization of language. Focusing on the domain of schooling, Chapter 5 of this volume illustrates how differing modes of governmentality in kokugo and keishōgo education aim at molding

14

Introduction: The heritage language learner?

students’ linguistic proficiency, behavior, and subjectivities in different ways. This amounts to targeted construction of “Japanese” and the heritage language learners. To date, much research on governmentality has focused on the first of the two notions of governmentality, i.e., modes of governmentality derived from wider changes in institutional arrangements, such as advanced liberalism (Rose 1996), and the effects of such shifts (Dunn 2004; Molé 2008; Yan 2003). Drawing on Dean’s framework, we call for more use of the second notion because it allows us to investigate the interfaces between different modes of governmentality (see Doerr and Lee 2012).

1.6.3 Constructing heritage language learners by giving them meanings This volume also sheds light on how the heritage language learner was constructed through individuals’ meaning-making practices about programs and about themselves. In Chapter 6, we highlight the importance of the idea of mentalities of government, which stresses that “the same activity can be regarded as a different form of practice [of government] depending on the mentalities that invest it” (Dean 1999: 17). For example, a self-government of dieting can be exercised to attain a virile body, prevent heart disease, conform with divine law, or respect taboos. Each of these purposes falls under a different regime of government drawing on certain forms of knowledge and seeking to act upon certain aspects of the dieter’s being (Dean 1999). Attending to this aspect of governmentality is important because it reveals the efficacy and effects of a given mode of governmentality. However, little ethnographic research has investigated such possible competing modes of governmentality behind practices that look the same on the surface. Much recent work investigates transitions from one mode of governmentality to another as identified by the researchers, such as from a socialist mode of governmentality to that of neoliberalism (Dunn 2004, 2008; Rose 1996; Yan 2003), or from a welfare state to neoliberalism (Molé 2008). We problematize researchers’ identifying the existence of modes of governmentality in these studies, arguing instead for examining the ways the studied individuals give meaning to discourses and daily practices as they experience certain modes of governmentality. Therefore, in Chapter 6 we illustrate how, depending on students’ and parents’ perceptions, the same class activities worked as very different modes of governmentality, producing very different legitimacies and subjectivities. In examining two ways in which individuals gave meanings to practices in hoshūkōbu and the keishōgo program, we argue that it is individuals who summon the

On collaboration

15

mode of governmentality by investing it with meanings. The different understandings of these two programs are fertile ground for analysis of how students, parents, administrators, and researchers construct, give meanings to, and contest others’ perceptions of what “knowing Japanese language” and thus “being Japanese” entails. Chapter 7 discusses construction of heritage language learners through their bridging the space between the Japanese language proficiency they develop in JJLS and the mainstream American educational system. Focusing on how JJLS students give meaning to their learning Japanese, or what motivates their attending JJLS throughout their childhood and adolescence, we analyze how some JJLS students create a link between JJLS and mainstream American education while others do not, and examine the role of policies in mainstream American education. We then argue that those who transition their frame of reference in learning Japanese from Japan to the United States are then constructed anew as heritage language learners of Japanese in relation to learners of Japanese as a foreign language in the United States. In sum, heritage language learners are constructed as new objects of knowledge to be governed. However, those who come to be considered heritage language learners are not merely passive objects of researchers’ and administrators’ scrutiny and governments; rather, while being interpellated into various regimes of difference as heritage language learners, they also cite specific regimes of difference themselves and take advantage of their institutional settings. The three ways the heritage language learner is constructed are interconnected, as research informs school operations and school operations provide data for research. Research findings, disseminated in accessible form in school orientations and by school administrators and teachers, influence students’ and parents’ perceptions, which in turn provide data for further research, as discussed in Chapter 8. Knowledge and power, governmentality, regime of difference, interpellation, and performativity: use of these concepts furthers understanding of how multiple parties construct heritage language learners. This volume offers the field of heritage language education, which assumes the existence of heritage language learners, a fresh perspective. It sheds light on how one becomes, is made into, and resists becoming a heritage language learner in relations of power where people vie to know, manage, govern, and define each other.

1.7 On collaboration This study is a collaborative effort between a cultural anthropologist (Doerr) and a school administrator with training in linguistics (Lee). Doerr, who approached Lee for collaboration, designed the research. Doerr designed interview questions,

16

Introduction: The heritage language learner?

conducted most of the interviews, performed all the participant observation, and analyzed the data. Lee handled permissions, conducted some interviews, provided information on JJLS, and provided critical feedback in the analysis stage. A division of labor also governed the writing process, although we thoroughly read and suggested revisions of each other’s writing. Doerr provided the main argument, theoretical framework, general review of literature, and data analysis, while Lee provided the review of heritage language education literature as well as information on Japanese language schools in general, MEXT operations, and history, structures, daily operations, and politics at JJLS. Our different training and relationships to the school resulted in differences in approach that we had to overcome in three main areas. The first concerned the approach we took to describe the Jackson Course. Given her research interest in investigating how heritage language learners are constructed, Doerr sought to document all the perceptions of the Jackson Course within the JJLS community. In contrast, as an administrator with experience building a Japanese language program at her home institution, Lee was well aware of the importance of focusing on benefits for the program and thus tended to dismiss opinions detrimental to the Jackson Course. In the end, however, as this work focuses on the construction of heritage language learners, we prioritized inclusion of all perceptions of the course. The second difference involved the treatment of the existing literature on heritage language education. Approaching from the Foucauldian perspective of knowledge and power, Doerr saw the literature as, first, an effort to carve out a new field of research and, second, part of a continuum leading to the JJLS administrators’, students’, and parents’ efforts to construct heritage language learners. Therefore, Doerr sought to survey various existing definitions of heritage language learners and research approaches. In contrast, Lee saw the existing literature as a theoretical repertoire to choose from in order to understand and situate, as well as guide, the operation of the Jackson Course at JJLS. Our third divergence related to the use of criteria to measure linguistic proficiency. Doerr viewed such criteria, drawing on Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), as arbitrarily created by researchers and school administrators who mark certain traits as important skills to be learned based on the worldview of the dominant group. Therefore, Doerr viewed the criteria as spawned from and further perpetuating certain relations of power. Lee, however, from a position of school administrator, regarded criteria as useful, if not necessary, in operating school programs. After discussion, we arrived at the compromise of using linguistic proficiency criteria to describe students and viewing such criteria as a kind of vocabulary that helps us reach those who are familiar with such criteria, while retaining the main analytical position of awareness of the criteria’s arbitrariness.

The structure of the book

17

This study was much strengthened by the recognition of these differences. Anthropological perspectives provide a new angle from which to understand the research field of heritage language education. They question and analyze frameworks that are often taken for granted – such as the notion of defined criteria in linguistic proficiency – in a field that tends to focus on applied aspects. This approach helps situate heritage language education, and the research on it, as a kind of social practice in a wider social milieu. Meanwhile, the practitioner’s involvement in this study is valuable not only because of her in-depth understanding of teaching practices and structures, especially their particular philosophies that would not otherwise have been available (Hawkins 2005: 38), but also because of her in-depth knowledge of the inside workings of JJLS. Additionally, the practitioner’s involvement allows the research to represent its findings in ways useful to practitioners redesigning practices (Hawkins 2005), as shown in Chapters 8 and 9. This study is a result of both negotiating and taking advantage of our different approaches and perspectives. We believe that our collaboration deepened our observation and analyses and provided opportunities to discuss findings and ideas that are usually not available in research done by a single author.

1.8 The structure of the book Chapter 2 examines existing theories on heritage language learners as an effort to establish a new field of investigation, whereby relations of dominance arise between those who know and those who become the object of knowing. It also investigates effects of existing research, perpetuating the reified notions of language, linguistic community, and language speaker. Chapter 3 introduces the field site – Jackson Japanese Language School – and describes the methods we used in our investigation. Chapter 4 discusses negotiations between the MEXT and the JJLS local administrators regarding establishment of a keishōgo program – the Jackson Course – and defining who the target students are for hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course, which involved negotiation of who is “Japanese”. Chapter 5 introduces two programs at JJLS – hoshūkō-bu, based on the kokugo curriculum, and an alternative program, the Jackson Course, based on the keishōgo curriculum – and describes the modes of governmentality they deploy. Chapter 6 describes contestations among JJLS administrators, MEXT officials, teachers, parents, and students over the meaning of the difference between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course, the chief question being whether to evoke the regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track kokugo education or

18

Introduction: The heritage language learner?

that of kokugo vs. keishōgo education. Chapter 7 traces students’ changing motivations to attend JJLS in three stages and highlights how the mainstream American education system can motivate them to continue studying Japanese when it regards their knowledge as educational capital. Chapter 8 discusses the loop between the school’s institutional arrangement on the one hand, and student and parent perceptions on the other, by examining changes made in the Jackson Course’s organization in response to students’ or parents’ views. Finally, Chapter 9 summarizes this volume’s argument and suggests theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

2 An emerging field of investigation: Construction of the heritage language learner as a new object of study The fundamental difficulty in configuring a description that is both elastic and explicit stems from the diversity of individuals and populations that can bear the label HLL [heritage language learner]. — Maria Carreira, “Seeking Explanatory Adequacy”

2.1 A new term on the block The term “heritage language” is believed to have first emerged in Canada in the 1970s to refer to the language education of minority groups other than Frenchspeaking Canadians. It was coined in the context of development of federal and provincial multicultural policies as various minority groups exerted increasing pressure to include and recognize their culture and language. The term heritage language was used to make a point that such a language is the heritage of all Canada, not a foreign language (Tavares 2000). However, the term was also problematic because “heritage” implies the past and, by implication, ancient cultures and primitive times. From this perspective, the term “international language” was preferred (Wiley 2001; for a similar view of the term “heritage”, see García 2005). In the United States, the term heritage language gained currency in the 1990s, as we describe in this chapter. It coincided with increasing support from the wider public to preserve minority languages (Peyton et al. 2001).1 Heritage language research often acknowledges the sentiment expressed in the epigraph to this chapter – the diversity of those called heritage language learners (Horneberger and Wang 2008; Wiley 2001). Why do we need a common label to discuss such diverse situations? What are we doing, by trying to find common ground for totally different issues? What is the point of a field of research encompassing issues so diverse that conversing with each other may not make sense at times? What types of theoretical concepts about language, linguistic community, and language speakers does discussion of heritage language encourage? What happens in the process? We explore these questions

1 The concept remains largely restricted to North American usage. In Japan, terms such as bogo ‘mother tongue’ are used for what is called heritage language in North America (see the Web site for Bogo/keishōgo/bilingual Kenkyūkai [MHB] at www.mhb.jp for more information.)

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An emerging field of investigation

in this chapter, drawing on existing debates on modern nation-states and language, standardization, linguistics, and the “native speaker2” concept, as well as Foucault’s notion of regime of truth and knowledge and power. In what follows, we first introduce a history of language policies in the United States, trace when and how the term “heritage language” came into use there, introduce two types of definition of heritage language and their relationship to each other, and discuss the implications of the debate over different definitions of heritage language, the emerging field of heritage language research, and assumptions they are based on and performatively perpetuate.

2.2 Shifts in language policies in the United States Language policies in the United States generally consist of case-by-case responses to immediate needs and political pressures. Absent a unified national policy on language, “English” has never been declared an official language of the whole United States, although the idea that English should be its sole language persists. In the nineteenth century, it was the perceived threat from a huge influx of Germans that sparked debate on the need to secure English as the official language. In general, when immigrants outnumber locals, the language used as a medium of instruction at school becomes a topic of debate (Hubner 1999; Pavlenko 2002). Nonetheless, at least until the 1880s, language ideologies and resulting policies and practices in the United States were relatively tolerant of the maintenance of immigrant languages of European origin (Pavlenko 2002). However, Asian and Native American languages were seldom tolerated. For example, the children of Asian immigrants were not included in mainstream education, and their language maintenance was often left to local communities (Wong 1988). From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, many Native American children were taken from their homes to English-only boarding schools, where instruction in Native American languages was forbidden by law (Draper and Hicks 2000). The twentieth century saw increasing pressure toward English monolingualism. In 1906, Congress passed a measure making the ability to speak English a condition for US citizenship (Draper and Hicks 2000). Around the time of the

2 Just like the notion of heritage language learner, the notion of native speaker is constructed (see Doerr 2009b). Therefore, the term native speaker should be in quotation marks. However, for the sake of readability, the quotation marks around the term are omitted throughout this book. Same applies to the notion of the non-native speaker and foreign language speaker.

Shifts in language policies in the United States

21

anti-German hysteria of World War I, a hegemonic discourse of English monolingualism was established. Only then did “Americanization” become a synonym for Anglicization and/or Anglo-Saxonization and a preoccupation in the United States. Between the years of 1917 and 1922, more than 30 states passed Americanization laws obliging aliens unable to speak or read English to attend public evening language schools. Thirty-four states also passed official English-language policies that declared English the only language of instruction in public schools. These policies were promoted by emphasizing the superiority of English as a language of high moral and intellectual value. Bilingualism, foreign language education, and immigrant language maintenance were thereby delegitimized. The legacy of this view is visible in the way immigrant language maintenance is considered a personal choice in the United States (Pavlenko 2002). In the 1960s, another influx of immigrants, mainly from Asian and Latin American countries, arrived after the passage of amendments constituting the Immigration Act of October 3, 1965. Changing the tenets of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1953, the 1965 amendments allowed the immigration of people with special knowledge, skills, and abilities needed in the United States (Segal 2002). Again, teaching immigrants’ children English to ease them into mainstream education became a focus of bilingual education (Pavlenko 2002). Efforts to maintain minority language continued, however. Chinese, for example, has been taught in both community-based language schools and public school systems in the United States (Chao 1997; He and Xiao 2008). Fishman and Nahirny (1966: 94) reported that “approximately 2000 ethnically affiliated schools were operating in the continental United States in 1960” in the form of “All Day Schools”, “Weekday Afternoon Schools”, and “Weekend Schools”.3 Researchers began emphasizing the importance of maintaining minority languages, which is beneficial to children’s self-esteem (Write and Taylor 1995), advantageous to learning or relearning the language in native fluency (Au 2008), and important in nurturing their “cultural identity” (Otcu 2010a, 2010b). In the 1990s, researchers began advocating bilingualism as “a national resource” (Brecht and Walton 1994). Maintenance of minority languages came to be encouraged at the policy level as well. For example, the educational self-determination and federal funding stipulated in the Native American Language Act of 1990 and United States 3 Despite the large size of the Spanish-speaking immigrant community, its community language schools seem fewer than those devoted to maintaining other immigrants’ languages. This could be due to the relatively extensive availability of Spanish bilingual and foreignlanguage courses in secondary and postsecondary-level education (Carreira and Rodriguez 2011).

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An emerging field of investigation

Federal Native Language Act of 1992 strengthened Native American tribes’ ability to maintain their language (Waldman 2009). Special communities excepted, however, the maintenance of immigrant or heritage languages, especially for children in primary and secondary schools, relies on community-based heritage language schools and is an individual choice.

2.3 Emergence of the term “heritage language” in the United States As the epigraph that opens this chapter shows, heritage language learner is, given its various coexisting definitions, an imprecise concept. Terrence Wiley (2001: 29) argues that “as with any attempt to apply a single label to a complex situation, defining heritage language is problematic”; Maria Carreira (2004: 1) likewise contends that “no sole definition is capable of embracing all and only such individuals that could conceivably be argued to fall under the heading of ‘heritage language learner’”. The different contexts in which research is based lead to different conceptualizations of heritage language learners – for instance, much of the bilingual education research preceding heritage language research was on Spanish heritage language learners whose situations differed from other linguistic minorities’. Researchers seek to sort out this complexity. For example, Guadalupe Valdés (2001) divided the notion of heritage language learner into two fields: (1) individuals having historical or personal connection to a language such as an endangered indigenous language or immigrant language that is not normally taught in school; or (2) individuals who appear in a foreign language classroom, who are raised in homes where a non-English language is spoken, speak or merely understand the HL, and are to some degree bilingual in English and the HL. (Valdés 2001: 37–38)

Maria Carreira (2004) posits three categories defining heritage language learners: (1) members of a linguistic minority community in which membership does not depend on linguistic proficiency; (2) individuals seeking symbolic membership in a linguistic community in a wide sense, i.e., through their ancestral background; and (3) individuals with linguistic proficiency higher than that of foreign language speakers of the target language but lower than native speakers of the language. Carreira’s first and second categories correspond to the more inclusive notion in Valdés’s first definition. Carreira’s third category corresponds to Valdés’s second field. Wiley (2001) offers three types of definition of heritage language: those describing a type of educational program; those based on a definition from the

Emergence of the term “heritage language” in the United States

23

community’s perspective; and those considering relationships between language varieties, such as sociolect and diglossia. He also differentiates its use in the context of language revitalization from that in the context of discussion of pedagogy. Before we discuss the implications of the diversity in definitions of the heritage language learner, we describe below two fields that correspond roughly to Valdés’s two definitions4 – which we call self-esteem-based and linguistic proficiency-based – and discuss kinds of worldview they perpetuate.

2.3.1 Self-esteem-based definition of the heritage language learner The self-esteem-based heritage language learner definition, interpreted from a collective viewpoint, concerns linguistic revival or maintenance, and ultimately the cultural autonomy of the community. From an individual perspective, it is about raising the self-esteem of individual learners in mainstream schools where minority languages are devalued (Campbell 2003; Carreira 2004; Write and Taylor 1995). Maintenance bilingual education and minority language maintenance have not been prominent, but they have existed in the United States, as mentioned earlier. This self-esteem-based definition corresponds to Valdés’s first definition and Carreira’s first two categorizations. Hornberger and Wang add the notion of agency, defining heritage language learners as individuals who have familial or ancestral ties to a particular language that is not English and who exert their agency in determining whether or not they are HLLs [heritage language learners] of that HL [heritage language] and HC [heritage culture]. (Hornberger and Wang 2008: 6)

In this approach, the definition of the heritage language learner relies on a regime of difference, specifically, of the English-monolingual American mainstream vs. heritage language learners of a minority language. In the 1990s the term heritage language came into use in various fields of bilingual education to designate language that has been referred to as “immigrants’ language”, “community language”, and “home language”, as mentioned. 4 The term heritage language learner is also used to mean children of immigrants who have limited proficiency in English in the context of English-as-a-second-language education in secondary school. In this context, the goal of ESL education is to help students transition to mainstream English-only classrooms as quickly as possible. The linguistic goal is English acquisition only, not the maintenance of their other languages. However, this use of the term is uncommon in the discussion of heritage language learners.

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An emerging field of investigation

The reason for this shift, according to Peyton et al. (2001), is threefold. First, past efforts at heritage language instruction were community-initiated and outside the public school system, but recent efforts involve formal educational systems. Second, knowledge about language maintenance and teaching is greater than ever before. Third, for the first time in US history, growing recognition that speakers of non-English languages can be a resource for the country as a whole has bolstered public support for heritage language education. The historical background supporting this change, Peyton et al. argue, is the emerging awareness that bilinguals who know both English and an immigrant language enrich the nation as well as themselves, and that globalization, democratization, and the new position of the United States as a world power dictate a need for individuals who can speak languages other than English (Peyton et al. 2001; also see Brecht and Ingold 2002; Wiley and Valdés 2001). The first official move in this domain was the establishment of the Heritage Language Initiative by the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) and the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in 1998. It aimed at building an education system that supports heritage language communities in order to develop citizens who can speak both English and another language. The Heritage Language Initiative’s first national effort was the National Conference on Heritage Languages in America, held in Long Beach, California, in 1999 (Peyton et al. 2001). The National Security Language Initiative of 2006 – a manifestation of a focus on language proficiency in the United States in the 2000s – aimed to increase the number of advanced-level speakers of non-English languages through initiatives that, among other things, increased scholarships for study abroad and domestic summer programs for teachers and students. The Alliance for the Advancement of Heritage Languages was established to connect individuals and organizations working to maintain heritage languages for the benefit of individuals, communities, and society.5 García et al. (2012: 33) argue that, compared to the initiative by NFLC and CAL, the National Security Language Initiative is based on “negative peace”, which is framed around a security agenda; hence the target languages and their speakers are viewed as “foreign” and thus not American. It is important to note here that although, as mentioned, the term heritage was used first in Canada to indicate shared heritage, it has provoked resistance for connoting the past (García 2005).

5 http://www.cal.org/heritage/ Accessed 11 May 2012.

Emergence of the term “heritage language” in the United States

25

2.3.2 Linguistic-proficiency-based definition of the heritage language learner The linguistic-proficiency-based definition of the heritage language learner defines the learner in opposition to foreign language learners on the one hand and native speakers on the other (Campbell and Peyton 1988; Chevalier 2004; Draper and Hicks 2000; He 2006; Wiley and Valdés 2001). That is, the term heritage language learner is defined based on a regime of difference: native speaker vs. heritage language learner vs. foreign language learner. One example of this approach defines the heritage language learner as Someone who has had exposure to a non-English language outside the formal education system. It most often refers to someone with a home background in the language, but may refer to anyone who has had in-depth exposure to another language. (Draper and Hicks 2000: 19)

In another such definition, these learners are people who speak their first language, which is not English, in the home or are foreign-born. (Campbell and Peyton 1988: 38)

While the notion of the heritage language learner under the self-esteem-based definition merely replaces existing labels for bilingual speakers of English and immigrant languages, under the linguistic-proficiency-based definition the notion of the heritage language learner delineates a new categorization of language learners that did not exist before – those who are neither native speaker nor foreign language speaker but in between. Where immigrant students were once put in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) classes or remedial English classes to transition into mainstream monolingual English classes, now they could be enrolled in a foreign language class with students who had no background in the target language. This put foreign language teachers in the position of teaching a group of students – i.e., those with background knowledge of the target language – that they were not trained to teach (Draper and Hicks 2000). Groups of students with exposure to the target language in the home started to appear in college-level foreign language programs in the 1970s (Kataoka 1978). Teachers focused on aspects of language acquired only through schooling, such as grammatical knowledge, and did not value the abilities these students had (Krashen 1998); moreover, the pedagogical differences between foreign and heritage language instruction went largely ignored (Roca 2000). Meanwhile, the students themselves felt uncomfortable in a foreign language class. For example, Krashen (1998) points out the phenomenon of “language shyness”, exhibited by students of Spanish-speaking background who, when regarded as low-proficiency native

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speakers, often feel embarrassed about not living up to perceived native speaker proficiency. In the 1990s instructors and researchers began paying attention to this group – newly called “heritage language learners” – and advocating the development of different curricula and methods for them (Kanno et al. 2008; KondoBrown 2003; Krashen 1998; Roca 1997, 2000; Valdés 2001). Awareness of the lack of pedagogies for heritage language learners emerged perhaps most clearly when the National Foreign Language Standards Task Force began its deliberation on standards in foreign language education in 1993. This led to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL)/Hunter College project, founded in 1997 with the support of the US Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) to create a program to train foreign language teachers to work effectively with heritage language learners. Based on their findings, the Hunter College program for foreign language teacher certification required its students to take a method course specifically designed for heritage language learners (Webb 2000). Krashen (1998) advocated designating a separate space for heritage language study to help learners feel more secure. The American Association of Spanish and Portuguese has been responsive to the need for teacher training in the field of Spanish for heritage speakers (Roca 2000). The University of Hawai’i at Manoa offers a separate track for students with a background in their target language (Kondo-Brown 2003). The number of secondary schools and universities offering such courses has increased dramatically (Collisten 1994). This sense of the term heritage language learner became widespread after the National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project published its Standards for Foreign Language Learning in 1996 (Valdés 2001).

2.3.3 Interconnection, disjuncture, and critique The two fields of research grounded in learner self-esteem and language proficiency, respectively, are interconnected. Efforts to maintain minority language affect the proficiency of heritage language learners. Heritage language proficiency builds self-esteem in individual learners as well as the heritage language community (Otcu 2010a, 2010b). Some definitions of heritage language learners combine the fields of interest: [. . .] a collection of different types of learners who share the characteristic of having identity and linguistic needs that relate to their family background. These needs arise from having had insufficient exposure to their HL [heritage language] and HC [heritage culture] during their formative years. Satisfying these needs provides a primary impetus for pursuing language learning. (Carreira 2004: 28)

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However, these same fields of research are disjunctive in some contexts. For example, at Jackson Japanese Language School, our research site, roughly half of the students in the Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) classes, especially in lower grades, have some family connection to Japan (e.g., a Japanese mother born and raised in Japan). They chose or were placed in the JFL class rather than the keishōgo class because they had little or no BICS. While self-esteembased definitions categorize them as heritage language learners, linguisticproficiency-based definitions do not regard them as such. Such a disjuncture is little addressed in heritage language research.6 Moreover, upon closer examination these definitions fail in more fundamental ways. First of all, an individual’s associations with a language can take various forms depending on the criteria in use – degree of comfort in using it, timing of when one learned it, frequency of use, symbolic value, and whether one identifies with it (see Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1989). Given this multiplicity of possibilities, the notion of “personal association with a language” becomes less useful, as an individual may choose to associate with different languages depending on the context or the questions asked. Second, the assessment of linguistic proficiency needs to be questioned in terms of who has the authority to judge what is considered “proficiency” (Bourdieu 1991). Native speaker ideology provides a mythic standard against which to judge one’s proficiency. The validity of this standard has been challenged in view of the diversity among native speakers and the arbitrariness of designating certain native speakers as the model, as will be further discussed later (Doerr 2009b; Leung, Harris, and Rampton 1997; Pennycook 1994). Thus, definition of the heritage language learner according to linguistic proficiency is questionable in terms of who sets the criteria of judgment and who is judging. Third, language is not a bounded and unified unit but rather a continuum of diverse idiolects and “dialects”, as will be discussed more below. A “standard” or “legitimate” language is merely a dominant group’s linguistic variation imposed on others (Bourdieu 1991). This complicates the position of those heritage language learners who speak nonstandard varieties (Doerr and Lee 2010; Martinez 2003; Valdés 1981). In short, the criteria by which researchers categorize heritage language learners need to be questioned. Our aim here is not to discredit researchers’ efforts to define heritage language learners – as Carreira argues, they are responding to a need for a precise definition, which learners and their communities need to address issues of ethnolinguistic affiliation, inclusion, and exclusion. Teachers and administrators of heritage language programs also need it to design and 6 Polinsky and Kagan (2007) proposed “broad” and “narrow” definitions of heritage languages. In their terminology, the JFL students at JJLS are students of a broadly defined heritage language.

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select materials, place students, and train teachers (Carreira 2004). Our aim, then, is rather to understand the effects of researchers’ efforts to understand and examine who heritage language learners are – a category that itself emerged very recently – by shifting the gears of analysis.

2.4 Contested fields of research: Defining the heritage language learner While researchers are aware of the disjuncture among definitions of the heritage language learner (Hornberger and Wang 2008; Wiley 2001), they do not discuss it as the contestation of meanings; rather, they attribute it to the complexity of the situation (Wiley 2001) or lack of sophistication in other definitions (Hornberger and Wang 2008). We suggest instead analyzing the very act of contestation among researchers in defining who heritage language learners are. We contend that the act of defining who heritage language learners are is an act of suggesting how to view the world and thus of constructing reality. Contestation over the definition is thus a struggle in constructing reality, as Bourdieu argues below: The categories of perception, the schemata of classification, that is, essentially, the words, the names which construct social reality as much as they express it, are the stake par excellence of political struggle, which is a struggle to impose the legitimate principle of vision and division [. . .] There are always, in any society, conflicts between symbolic powers that aim at imposing the vision of legitimate divisions, that is, at constructing groups. Symbolic power, in this sense, is a power of “world-making”. (Bourdieu 1989: 20–21)

In this sense, then, researchers’ definitions of who are and who are not heritage language learners appear as “a struggle to impose the legitimate principle of vision and division” (Bourdieu 1989: 20). Thus, instead of trying to seek “better definition” of the heritage language learner by joining in that debate, we shift the focus to the study of the effect – heritage language effect – of these debates.

2.5 Knowledge and power It is important to analyse the act of doing research in terms of power relations and agency. The construction of heritage language learners is in part a process of subjecting a group of people to scrutiny and intervention. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Michel Foucault (1977) argues that the formation of the field of knowledge through development of an array of new institutions and academic disciplines is based on and further perpetuates power relations between those who

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wish to know and manage the access to knowledge via newly developed technologies of knowledge, and those who are made the object of knowledge. In our new field of investigation of heritage language learners, the power relations between those who wish to know and manage the access to the knowledge (researchers, language school administrators, and teachers) and those who are made the object of knowledge (heritage language learners) remain to be acknowledged and investigated. From this perspective, the emergence of the field of heritage language education does not reveal celebratory public support for language maintenance of linguistically minority communities in the era of globalization (see Peyton et al. 2001) so much as it indicates a rising concern and wish to manage minority linguistic communities as the global flow of immigrants expands. Ideologies of globalization not only urge individuals to gain new skills to survive in globalizing world but also create anxiety about uncontrolled circulation of people, things, and ideas (Doerr 2008; Friedman 2003). Research on heritage language education has other effects, which we discuss in the next section.

2.6 Reification of language, linguistic community, and language speakers: The heritage language effect The emerging notion of heritage language is based on and further performatively perpetuates particular ways of understanding our linguistic practices as well as ourselves. In this section, we discuss how the concept of heritage language supports reified notions of language, linguistic community, and language speakers, despite recent critiques of these notions. We draw on Judith Butler’s (1993) framework introduced in Chapter 1, which holds that a particular regime of difference and the epistemologies it is based on are reproduced by the very act of citing it as a meaningful set of categories and a way to classify people.

2.6.1 Reifying language and linguistic community The notion of heritage language is based on and perpetuates the premise that a language and its speech community (i.e., linguistic community) are each a clearly bounded unit. Research on heritage language education often takes for granted that the heritage language to be taught is a bounded unit separate from the mainstream language. In particular, self-esteem-based studies on heritage language education performatively cite the regimes of difference of mainstream language vs. heritage language and mainstream linguistic community

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vs. heritage language community as the meaningful categories by which to understand the position of heritage language speakers. By doing so, such studies perpetuate these regimes of difference and their assumption that these languages are separate entities with clear boundaries. Such reified notions of a language and its speech community derive from three historical developments that are interconnected with each other: the emergence of modern nation-states, the ideology of standardization, and the birth of modern linguistics. In the following subsections, we discuss these three developments and critiques of them, connecting them to the notion of heritage language education.

2.6.1.1 Language and nation-states The modern nation is imagined as a homogeneous unit defined in relation to other nations and bounded by single, unequivocal lines between them (Anderson 1991). In this development, marginalized groups have come to be viewed no longer as synchronically different (“foreign”) but as diachronically different (“backward”), and thus needing to be assimilated into the nation modeled after its dominant group, a process perceived as “catching up” (Morris-Suzuki 1998). Language has had a prominent role in the emergence and conceptualization of the nation-state and has been similarly imagined as an internally homogeneous unit with clear borderlines. In late eighteenth-century Germany, Johann Gottfried von Herder argued that the possession of its own distinctive language constitutes the touchstone of a people, essential to its national identity and spirit. Herder argued that a people, a nation, a culture, and a polity must be homogeneous and that diversity is unnatural and destructive of the sentiment that holds a people together. Herder’s idea became a model for the nation rather than a model of the nation, creating an ideology of a one-nation, one-language nation-state, as well as influencing the study of linguistics (Baliber 1994; Bauman and Briggs 2000), as we discuss later. Following Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that speaking a common language is the essence of a social bond. Language creates within members of a nation an “internal border” that separates nations (Fichte 1968; also, see Baliber 1994). Language was also salient in the development of nation-states. Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that a shared print language created a sense of fraternity that allowed people to imagine themselves as a nation. Ernest Gellner (1983) suggests that an industrial society with a complex division of labor needs mobile individuals with generic training – including literacy in a certain language – that enables them to follow occupational instructions. According to Gellner, the rise of mass education in this context helped create interchangeable individuals

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for the labor force. The boundary of interchangeability then became the boundary of the nation, whose members shared a language (Gellner 1983). Etienne Balibar (1988) argues that language can provide a group of people with a meaning for their continued existence. Shared language makes it possible for “people” to be represented as an autonomous unit. Here, language is what John Comaroff (1987) calls a significant medium of totemic consciousness of social relationships. The continuity of the language–nation link is assured by the family metaphor, connecting state agendas to the intimate realm of individuals (Borneman 1992). In the predominant imagining of the nation in Europe, fathers pass on land (which is the land they defend with their weapons rather than the land they cultivate) and mothers pass on the national language, “mother tongue” (Calvet 1998). While the term “mother tongue” reflects a European cultural convention, it is inaccurate in some cases because one might use the language of one’s father as one’s first language. Moreover, the definition of “mother tongue” is complex, due to the “multilingual” reality in most places around the world. According to Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson (1989) as mentioned, there are four possible definitions of “mother tongue”: (1) the language(s) one learns first; (2) the language(s) one knows best; (3) the language(s) one uses most; and (4) the language(s) one identifies with. In other words, one person may have different languages as “mother tongues”, depending on which definition is used. The second and third definitions – competence and function, respectively – fail to consider the fact that one might have poor proficiency in the language one learned first, for example, as a result of not having had the chance to learn and use it in the institutional settings where children spend most of their day (Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1989). In the late twentieth century, the above ideology of “one nation, one language” began to give way to new perceptions of nation-states. Resurgences of minority groups within nation-states and the postcolonial movements in the 1960s introduced the politics of difference, pushing for political orders that recognize cultural and linguistic differences of minority groups rather than suppressing them (Comaroff and Comaroff 2004; Kymlicka 1995; Omi and Winant 1994; Taylor 1994). The reconfiguration of world alliances after the Cold War, especially the emergence of various new nation-states, was also conducive to nation-states’ allowing minority groups to express their cultural difference rather than risking political secession by such groups (Appadurai 1990; Kymlicka 1995). The late capitalist development toward the end of twentieth century has transformed not only the way we experience time and space (Harvey 1990), but also the way we feel about our connection to others in the world (Friedman 2003; Tomlinson 1999). Arjun Appadurai (1990) describes how people, media images,

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technology, finances, and ideologies move in disjunctive ways. Others observe that these movements may be interrupted or resisted, causing friction (Tsing 2005), and that the discourse of globalization itself has become an ideology that encourages such globalizing development (Tsing 2000). As this situation came to be widely acknowledged as the process of “globalization”, the notion of language as internally homogeneous and homologous to the nation-state came to be increasingly challenged. However, two things should be noted. First, globalization processes brought not only blending and hybridity but also the practice of highlighting differences in the old forms. That is, globalization processes spawned a globally shared frame of reference against which cultural difference becomes accentuated (Hannerz, 1996; Robertson, 1992). Richard Wilk (1995) describes this situation as an emergence of “global structures of common difference” that organize diversity and allow us to communicate our differences to each other in ways that are widely intelligible. For example, cultural difference is expressed in dissimilarity between cuisines or artworks, which serve as shared frames to measure that difference. Wilk suggested that because all cultural differences are defined by universal categories and standards, people are becoming different in very uniform ways all around the world (also, see Taylor 1994). In this context, difference in language also becomes a device to highlight difference, encouraging the reified view of language that differentiates those who speak it from others who do not. The notion of the heritage language is one such example: immigrants teach their children the “national” language of the nation-state they are from as their heritage language, ignoring regional linguistic differences (Doerr and Lee 2010). Second, as shown in this brief review of the history of the modern nationstate’s development and the role of language in it, there has never been a bounded unit of language that is internally homogeneous: such a notion has always been a construction. Linguistic practices have always been diverse, full of regional, class, and gender variations even in languages considered more homogeneous than others, like Japanese (Lee 1996), and fluid and changing as people migrated within and between regions through processes of trade, colonization, and war (Calvet 1998). In short, the notions of language and linguistic community as internally homogeneous, bounded units developed during the emergence of modern nation-states and continued to exist even after the perception of nation-states changed in the era of “globalization”. The notion of the heritage language also perpetuates this view of language as homogeneous. Related to the formation of the nation-state is the practice we turn to now: standardization, whose roots predate the birth of the modern nation-state.

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2.6.1.2 Standardization Regarding oneself and others as speaking the same language is an effect of language ideologies. Louis-Jean Calvet (1998) argues that the history of language is the history of people seeking to manage multilingualism and variations in language. He argues that by converting differences into subordination and considering the language of others inferior, right from the start human beings established a premise for a “war of languages”. For example, political authorities tend to be suspicious of multilingualism as they view multiple languages as multiple loyalties and thus a temperamental flaw indicating a lack of trustworthiness (Irvine and Gal 2000). Language ideologies have played a large role in struggles over the management of multilingualism (Woolard 1998). One such language ideology is the standardization of language. James and Lesley Milroy (1991) describe standardization as a historical process that is always in progress; absolute standardization of a spoken language is never achieved without making it a dead language. Therefore, the Milroys argue, standardization is an ideology, and a standard language is an idea in mind rather than a reality. This ideology aims at ensuring fixed values (expressed as “correct” meanings of words, sentence structure, etc.) and preventing variability in spelling and pronunciation. Standardization is motivated by various social, political, and commercial needs. The ideology of standardization is implemented in overlapping and interconnected stages: selection of the standard and its acceptance by influential people, accordance of prestige to the selected linguistic variety and its diffusion to the general public, and maintenance by means of codification and prescription (Milroy and Milroy 1991; also see Crowley 1989). Pierre Bourdieu (1991) argues that hierarchy among linguistic varieties emerges when the political authority imposes on its citizens an official language as the only legitimate one, thus rendering the remaining linguistic varieties “dialects”, “vernaculars”, or “broken” versions of the language. This establishes a “linguistic community”, in which the common (mis-)recognition of the legitimacy of the standard occurs while access to that language remains uneven. The standard language gains symbolic capital through a unified education system that teaches it as the only legitimate language, a unified labor market whose labor force is differentiated by the education system, and a perceived connection between the standard language and social qualities such as moral rectitude, civilization, and education (Bauman and Briggs 2000; Milroy and Milroy 1991; Romaine 1997). The strong impulse to standardize in nation-states is due to the ideology of the nation-state. In England, for example, the Received Pronunciation (RP) developed in the nineteenth century was not based on common or uniform

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pronunciation but on that of well-educated individuals, whom the linguists considered “civilized” and thus worthy of emulation (Crowley 1989; Milroy 1999). That is, the value of the standard spoken form was defined by the social status of its speakers. The impulse to standardize also exists at the levels of empire, the global, and minority language education. Ivan Illich (1981) illustrates the emergence of language standardization based on the vernacular of the dominant group as a way of governance in the fifteenth century. Elio Antonio de Nebrija created the grammar of Castilian and presented it to Queen Isabella so that she could colonize the speech of her subjects within Spain and others within her empire. As Nebrija put it, “[l]anguage has always been the consort of empire, and forever shall remain its mate”. It was not the first time a grammar was made, but it was the first time a grammar was made not to teach “classical” language to the selected few but to teach the dominator’s language to everyone in her domain (Illich 1981; also see Train 2009). At the global level, some (e.g., Quirk 1985, 1988) argue for standardizing English used around the world by setting the British RP as the standard. Categorizing regions around the world into Inner Circle (“traditional, cultural, and linguistic bases of English”), Outer Circle (“institutionalized non-native varieties in the regions that have passed through extended periods of colonization”), and Expanding Circle (regions where the performance varieties of the language are used essentially in EFL contexts), Braj Kachru (1992b: 356–357) suggests recognition and legitimation of separate linguistic norms in Outer Circle countries where people use English among themselves. He calls such variations “World Englishes” in the plural. The notion of World Englishes tends to treat each World English as internally homogeneous (for a similar critique, see Canagarajah 1999; Sakai 1997) and results in merely pluralizing English based on a nationalist framework and “excluding any other possibilities that destabilize this notion of global English in more fundamental ways” (Pennycook 2007: 104). The issue of standardization also arises in efforts to reverse language shift in minority languages. In the process of developing pedagogy to teach the minority language, educators often resort to the standardization within the language. Development of pedagogy suited to heritage language education (e.g., Douglas 2005; Kanno et al. 2008; Kondo-Brown 2008; Krashen 1998; Roca 1997, 2000; Valdés 2001), although mindful of diversity in the student body, often is uncritical of the diversity in language and linguistic practices and aims at teaching toward standardization. Its effects can be seen in the practice of schooling, where vernacular is repressed as improper (Yamasaki 2011), mixing with other language is discouraged (Makihara 2009), or the use of dialect is marked as out

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of the norm (Doerr and Lee 2010). On the other hand, resistance to standardization in efforts to revitalize minority language could result in thinning the human and educational resources (G. Smith 1990). Standardization simultaneously homogenizes and differentiates between people. It homogenizes people by creating a single criterion by which to measure the difference in language uses (Foucault 1977). Such a criterion allows one to objectify certain differences but not others as markers of a speech group. This criterion is what Michael Silverstein (1998) calls the naturalizing schemata of ideology: it explains how to interpret the connotation of the utterance – not the referential meaning of the said words but the meaning indexed by the way it was said. Standardization differentiates in order to measure gaps and determine levels of assimilation (Foucault 1977). It also differentiates by privileging one form of language over others and giving people differential access to that privileged form (Pennycook 1994). That differentiation does not result in acknowledgement of diversity but in marginalization of some as deficient. Basil Bernstein (2003) describes the differences between working-class and middle-class children’s codes of speech and how they pose disadvantages for the former speakers’ success in school: working-class children use a restricted code that is grammatically simple, contains unstated assumptions and is thus dependent on the knowledge of the listener, and is more suited to communicating practical experiences; middle-class children use an elaborated code that is grammatically accurate, logical, and descriptive, and is universalistic as it does not depend on the existing knowledge of a particular group or context. Because school culture privileges the latter kind of speech, working-class children tend not to succeed in school, according to Bernstein. In contrast, the “difference approach” regards the differential outcome of the dominant and marginalized groups’ school success as arising from discontinuity between the cultures and languages at school and those in the home or neighborhood, without arguing which is more desirable. Such an approach supports making school cultures and languages, which are conventionally based on the dominant group’s middle-class culture, more compatible with those of the lower class and/or ethnic minority groups. The latter approach, then, is a counterforce to the standardization processes. The idea of heritage language education takes the latter approach, viewing the minority language as extra resources the minority students possess rather than a hindrance to success in mainstream schooling. However, as mentioned, heritage language education can still aim at standardization within the heritage language itself, marginalizing some individuals.

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Behind the impulse for standardization lies not only the one-nation, onelanguage ideology of the nation-state but also the notion of language developed in linguistics, which we turn to now.

2.6.1.3 Linguistics Philosophers such as Herder viewed language as a homogeneous entity shared by the members of a homogeneous nation (although they also saw that not all the nation’s members developed their capacity to its full extent) (Bauman and Briggs 2000). Reflecting this understanding of language, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1965) in the early twentieth century viewed language as a fixed code shared by a homogeneous speech community. Countering this view of language was Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, which is based on the understanding that “at any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological – that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions” (Bakhtin 1981: 428). Volosinov, a Bakhtin Circle member, summarizes the circle’s critical stance against what they call Saussure’s “abstract objectivism”: “language presents the picture of a ceaseless flow of becoming [. . .] There is no real movement in time when a synchronic system of language [as Saussure suggests] could be constructed” (Volosinov 1973: 66). Most current linguists concur with the basic premise that “there is no such thing as a single language used at all times by all speakers. There is no such thing as a single English language; rather, there are many English languages (dialects and idiolects 7 ) depending on who is using the language and what the context of use is [. . .] variation in language is so pervasive that each language is actually a continuum of languages from speaker to speaker, and from group to group, and no absolute lines can be drawn between different forms of a language” (Akmajian et al. 1995: 261–264). Despite this understanding, some linguists still refer to a “language”, as if it were a single, monolithic entity by drawing on the criterion of “mutual intelligibility”, that is, similar pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. This is despite the recognition that in some cases, such as Mandarin and Cantonese, the concept of language is based on historical relationships, and that in other cases, such as Dutch and Flemish, a political distinction separates two mutually intelligible linguistic varieties (Akmajian et al. 1995).

7 Idiolect is “the form of a language spoken by a single individual” (Akmajian et al. 1995: 261).

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Also, some linguistic analytical concepts still imply the existence of homogeneous, discrete languages. For example, concepts such as “code-switching”, “code-mixing”, “language borrowing”, and “multi/bilingualism” presuppose a bounded code or language (García 2005; Pennycook 2004; Urciuoli 1995). Other linguistic theories propel the standardization processes by offering concepts to frame linguistic differences in hierarchical ways, such as dichotomies of language/ dialect, native/non-native, and standard/nonstandard, as well as the notion of interlanguage (the variety spoken by non-native speakers) which is considered deficient in light of the native speaker’s language. These dichotomies and concepts are based on and naturalize the view that certain varieties of language are more “correct” and “desirable” than others, justifying the imposition of the former on the latter (Bhatt 2001; Firth and Wagner 2007; Romaine 1997; Urciuoli 1995). Because such a disparity is “an unresolved debate among linguists” (Nero 2006: 6), it creates practical issues in everyday situations. For example, whether or not a language variety is considered a separate language or a dialect has implications for demanding “bilingual education”, receiving appropriate educational support, and claiming authenticity and legitimacy (Nero 2006). In the area of bilingual education, some researchers have begun suggesting new concepts to overcome this problem in recent years. Ofelia García (2011) and García, Zakharia, & Otcu (2013) critique bilingual and dual language education as well as heritage language education for their reliance on monoglossic epistemology, which views bilingualism as linear and additive – the sum of two separate languages – instead of acknowledging its heteroglossic character in individuals’ linguistic practices. They then suggest a kind of language education based on the idea of “sustainable languaging”. It would view language as “not something that human beings have, but an ongoing process” of languaging (García 2011: 7). As opposed to language maintenance, which aims to conserve the language as spoken “originally” by the group, sustainability refers to “the capacity to endure, but always in interaction with the social context in which it operates” (García 2011: 7; emphasis original). In the space of education, this shift in concept means a shift from compartmentalizing each language, in which students are to be immersed separately, to encouraging students to use multiple languagings (García 2011). In sum, the discussion about heritage language education as based on the power relation between the heritage language community and the mainstream society (self-esteem-based approach) is premised on and performatively perpetuates reified notions of language and linguistic community. The legacy of the one-nation, one-language ideology of the nation-state lives on in the era of “globalization”, in which differences among peoples are accentuated by

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drawing on the model of reified language that developed with the birth of nation-states. Standardizing impulses continue in the realm of developing specific pedagogy for heritage language education, as the field of heritage language education develops as an area distinct from language arts class for native speakers or foreign language education, which we discuss in the next subsection. The theorization of “languaging” or “translanguaging” is an important step toward countering the reified notions of language and linguistic community. There remains, however, the practical question of how to square it with naming practice. What can we call heterogeneous linguistic practices, as seen for example in an utterance “mixing Japanese and English”, without using conventional names for language and thus evoking the assumption of languages’ internal homogeneity that developed through the history we reviewed? In the example above, the term “Japanese” evokes a single bounded and homogeneous language and ignores regional, class, gender, and age variation in linguistic practices in the Japanese archipelago and beyond. If we continue to describe languaging practice in such ways, we are still relying on the reified notion of language, from which the languaging draws “resources”. Attention should also be drawn to how participants in language education give meanings to such practices. If students are learning a particular language out of need for a sense of belonging to a nation imagined as homogeneous, or if individuals view themselves as speaking one language despite the fact that researchers may describe their practice as hybrid, attending to such meaningmaking practices is necessary because they influence these individuals’ actions.

2.6.2 Reifying the language speaker The notion of heritage language in the linguistic-proficiency-based research relies on the regime of difference of native speaker vs. heritage language learner vs. foreign/second language learners. As described earlier, the notion of heritage language learner was introduced to carve out a new space of learning, a new type of linguistic proficiency, and a new type of language learner in the existing regime of difference of native speaker vs. foreign/second language learner. This discussion assumes that these types of language speakers can be separated out as distinct groups, which relates to the notion of the reified linguistic community discussed above because the native speakers and foreign/second language speakers are viewed as belonging to separate linguistic communities. The latter are thus considered non-native speakers as opposed to native speakers. Although the notion of heritage language speakers is an intervention in this binary, it still operates on the premise that language proficiency and a type of

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language speaker can be categorized as a part of a reified group in a monoglossic manner. In other words, heritage language education theory is based on, and performatively further reifies, types of language speakers, albeit it increases their number from two to three. To illustrate this, we will review below the notion of native speakers and its critiques, developed extensively in applied linguistics and second language acquisition theories (for extensive discussion, see Doerr 2009b).

2.6.2.1 The native speaker concept In foreign/second language teaching, the native speaker is treated as the model of an ideal speaker of the language. This assumption is so widespread that the topic of discussion in language teaching is not whether to use the native speaker as a model but “which kind of native speaker should be the model for language teaching” (Cook 1999: 188–189). In official pronouncements, the native speaker is often regarded as a model speaker whose intuition in the language makes him/her a natural judge. The ESL standards for pre-K–12 students in the United States in “TESOL’s [Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages] Vision of Effective Education for All Students” include the following statement (see Doerr and Kumagai 2009 for details): Effective education for TESOL students includes native like levels of proficiency in English. (Teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc; emphasis added)

In the guidelines for foreign language teaching in the United States, the Speaking Guideline (ACTFL 1999) for the “Superior Level” is described as: They demonstrate virtually no pattern of error [. . .] in the use of basic structures. However, they may make sporadic errors [. . .] Such errors, if they do occur, do not distract the native interlocutor or interfere with communication. (emphasis added)

Similarly, the Writing Guideline (ACTFL 2001) for the “Superior Level” states: Writers at the baseline of the superior level will not demonstrate the full range of the functional abilities of educated native writers [. . .] Errors do not interfere with comprehension and they rarely distract the native reader. (emphasis added)

Alan Davies (2003) explains how such use of the native speaker concept is necessary not only in language teaching in particular but also in applied linguistics in general:

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An emerging field of investigation

Applied Linguistics makes constant appeal to the concept of the native speaker. This appeal is necessary because of the need applied linguistics has for models, norms and goals, whether the concern is with teaching or testing a first, second or foreign language, with the treatment of a language pathology, with stylistic discourse and rhetorical analysis or with some other deliberate language use. (Davies 2003: 1)

The main problem, then, is who comes up with the definition of native speakers. Jun Liu (1999: 174) argues: “Who does the defining of an NNS [non-native speaker] or a NS [native speaker]? What is the purpose of the NS/NNS dichotomy? If it identifies a NNS as less competent than a NS, then the definition and the dichotomy would be political [. . .] In fact, the NS/NNS dichotomy embodies linguistic imperialism.” Suresh Canagarajah (1999) further critiques the notion of native speaker as leading to the professional practice of preferential hiring of native speaker teachers, which is driven by “hidden motivations” informed by the political economy. He argues that this preferential hiring curtails job opportunities for non-native speakers from Outer and Expanding Circles8 even in their own homelands, allowing native speaker teachers to monopolize the job market. This preferential hiring also helps perpetuate the native speaker hegemony because non-native speaker teachers are considered a hindrance to socializing students into monolingual society, where the students’ multilingualism then becomes a liability because the mainstream society regards ethnic/linguistic diversity as a threat. In contrast, native speaker teachers help sustain the hegemony of standard English and contain the use of non-standard English (Canagarajah 1999). From the viewpoint of second language acquisition (SLA) theories, Firth and Wagner (2007) critically summarize how researchers (A) view the utterance of the native speaker as the warranted baseline to which non-native speaker data is compared, and as the benchmark for judgments of appropriateness, markedness, etc.; (B) view non-native speakers as the native speaker’s subordinates in terms of communicative competence; (C) view native speaker and non-native speaker interactions as inherently problematic encounters; (D) assume the internal homogeneity of native speakers and non-native speakers and clear-cut distinctions 8 Canagarajah uses the term “Periphery” for what Kachru calls “Outer” and “Expanding Circles” and the term “Center” for “Inner Circle”. Canagarajah defines Center speakers of English to be “the communities of North America, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, which claim ownership over English” and are “the industrially/economically advanced communities of the West, which sustain their ideological hegemony by keeping less-developed communities in Periphery status” (Canagarajah 1999: 79). Thus, he defines users of Periphery English to be “historically recent users of this language, many of whom would display sound multilingual competence in many codes – including the Center’s standard dialects as well as their indigenized variants of English” (Canagarajah 1999: 79).

Reification of language, linguistic community, and language speakers

41

between them – i.e., they assume a native speaker is speaking his/her mother tongue acquired from birth and a non-native speaker is not; (E) apply the categorizations of native speaker and non-native speaker regardless of how the individuals assigned these labels characterize themselves; (F) fail to take account of the multilingual reality of communities and the reality of more transient, interacting groups; and (G) compare observed features of interaction with “comparable” native speaker interactions (i.e., so-called “baseline” data) (Firth and Wagner 2007: 763–764). Firth and Wagner (2007) then suggest viewing non-native speakers’ utterances not as a deficit but as a resourceful, strategic deployment intended to accomplish social and interactional ends – for example, to display empathy, or to accomplish mutual understanding. In addition, native and non-native interlocutors may use the latter’s non-native status as a resource for sense-making: the former takes account of the latter’s non-native status in interpreting certain utterances by the latter (Firth and Wagner 2007). In the study of English language teaching (ELT), debates on the native/nonnative speaker relation have become especially heated since the publication of Robert Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism (1992), which illustrates the spread of English worldwide not as a neutral phenomenon but as a part of the foreign (imperialist) policies of Great Britain and later the United States. As English became a quintessential second language, or what Abram de Swaan (2001) calls a “hypercentral” language, the discussion about English native/non-native speaker relationships gained increasing significance. Researchers such as Braj Kachru (1992b) see moves to standardize the English used around the world as efforts to create a hierarchical relationship between native and non-native speakers, with the former positioned as the standard to which the latter should aspire. As mentioned earlier, Kachru thus suggests the notion of World Englishes in order to legitimize variations of English spoken by non-native speakers.

2.6.2.2 Alternative notions: English as a lingua franca Emerging research on English as a lingua franca (ELF) seeks to render the notion of native speaker obsolete. ELF is English used as a means of international communication across national and linguistic boundaries. ELF is used, in the strict sense, only among “non-mother tongue speakers” of English (Jenkins 2006: 160). Researchers view ELF not as a globally distributed, franchised copy of the English of the Inner Circle but as a language “developed independently, with a great deal of variation but enough stability to be viable for lingua franca communication” (Seidlhofer 2001: 138). ELF speakers have various linguistic and cultural backgrounds but recognize ELF as a shared resource and “activate

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An emerging field of investigation

a mutually recognized set of attitudes, forms, and conventions that ensure successful communication” with each other (Canagarajah 2007: 925). Here, the central need is communication with each other, not emulation of native speaker speech. Researchers thus argue that it is meaningless to measure the deviation of ELF speakers’ speech from that of the native speaker because the latter is not used as a frame of reference. ELF defies a single yardstick to measure its proficiency: each ELF interaction ushers in its own unique dynamics. ELF researchers view what conventional EFL researchers consider linguistic deficits as viable communication strategies (Canagarajah 2007; Seidlhofer 2001). If a yardstick is needed, it “should be an ‘expert in ELF use’ [rather than native speaker]” (House 2003: 573). These arguments challenge the relations of dominance between native and non-native speakers. However, Doerr (2009b) argues that this view ignores the fact that the hierarchy between native and non-native speakers is ultimately not caused by linguistic elements but by social relationships between groups of people who use these linguistic varieties (Bourdieu 1991). Thus, more attention should be drawn to how ELF speakers themselves perceive interactions among variously positioned native and non-native speakers (e.g., how ELF speakers give meanings to Asian English, European English, Arabic English, Hispanic English, African English). Also, discussions of ELF often ignore the way English serves as a gatekeeping mechanism, opening doors to some and closing them to others (Pennycook 2007).

2.6.2.3 Alternative labels Researchers also suggest alternatives to native speaker as labels to categorize individuals. Ben Rampton (1995) suggests decomposing the concept of native speaker into “the simple distinction between ‘expertise’ (skill proficiency, ability to operate with a language), and ‘allegiance’ (identification with a language, with the values, meanings and identities that it stands for). It is worth emphasizing that ‘expertise’ and ‘allegiance’ refer to linguistic identities – to cultural interpretations of a person’s relationship to a language” (Rampton 1995: 340; emphasis original). The advantages of the concept of expertise are several: experts do not have to feel close to what they are expert in; expertise is learned, not fixed or innate; expertise is relative; and expertise is partial. To achieve expertise, individuals undergo a peer-reviewed certification process whose standards of assessment can be reviewed and disputed (Rampton 1995). Expertise can be claimed by an individual, rather than judged by an “objective” criterion. The notion of allegiance can be further divided into affiliation (“a connection between people and groups that are considered to be separate or different”)

Construction of the heritage language through research

43

and inheritance (“the continuity between people and groups who are felt to be closely linked”): inheritance occurs within social boundaries while affiliation takes place across them (Rampton 1995: 342). These conceptualizations are useful in developing pedagogies sensitive to diverse students (see Leung, Harris, and Rampton 1997). Jenkins (2003) suggests describing people in terms of the number of languages they speak: monolingual English speaker (MES), bilingual English speaker (BES), and non-bilingual English speaker (NBES). NBES refers to those who speak English at a level of reasonable competence. Jenkins’s concept eliminates both the assumption that monolingualism is the norm and the distinction between “L1 [first language]” and “L2 [second language, thus non-native speakers’ language]” varieties of English, although she is aware of the problem of deciding what counts as “bilingual” competence. We would argue that there is a danger of MES simply being translated back to native speaker. These concepts also prioritize English over other language – why not call a speaker of Chinese and English a “Chinese-English bilingual speaker” instead of a bilingual English speaker? Meanwhile, both Rampton and Jenkins are using the monoglossic assumption that language is a bounded unit.

2.6.2.4 Contestations These researchers’ attempts help us move away from the uncritical notion of native speakers. However, the fundamental questions remain: “Who does the defining of a NNS or a NS? What is the purpose of the NS/NNS dichotomy?” (Liu 1999: 174). Or, more precisely, what is the purpose of categorizing language users? Who sets the criteria? For what purpose? Describing individuals in terms of a categorical classification of native/non-native speakers or “expert/nonexpert” or “monolingual/bilingual/multilingual” privileges certain criteria in categorizing (see Varenne and McDermott 1999). The same can be said about creating the new category of heritage language learner, to be added to the native speaker vs. foreign/second language learner binary. Both cases involve carving out bounded categories of individuals with heterogeneous and fluid linguistic practices by situating them in two “languages” – also seen as separate and bounded – and performatively citing particular regimes of difference.

2.7 Construction of the heritage language through research This chapter has discussed how the notion of the heritage language learner is based on and perpetuates reified notions of language, linguistic community,

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An emerging field of investigation

and language speakers. Building on such notions, researchers variously construct heritage language learners as minority groups in societies where the majority of people speak another language (self-esteem approach), as speakers with specific types of linguistic proficiency (linguistic-proficiency approach), and as a combination of the two. In the process, debates over the definition of the heritage language learner become power struggles to decide which meanings and worldviews are to prevail. Researchers’ debates over the definition of heritage language learners constitute a significant part of constructing heritage language learners, suggesting regimes of difference defining the categories into which individuals are interpellated. As will be described in Chapters 3 and 8, these perceptions of heritage language learners, along with the implied regimes of difference, affect actual language schools, especially when school administrators and teachers actively familiarize themselves with contemporary research. However, those who come to be considered heritage language learners are not mere passive objects of researchers’ and administrators’ scrutiny and knowledge but take advantage of the institutions and structures that emerge from the study of heritage language education. The rest of this volume ethnographically describes what happened at Jackson Japanese Language School.

3 Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School JJLS is a site where certain critical issues in the politics of schooling, the notion of the heritage language education, and effects of peer dynamics are manifest. Because it has two kinds of programs – one supported by the Japanese government and one independent – the school highlights the gap between the academic notion of heritage language and the Japanese folk term keishōgo ‘heritage language’. It also showcases complex ways individuals relate to heritage language and reveals ways heritage language learners are constructed through both institutional and everyday practices at school. In this chapter, after introducing JJLS and its keishōgo program, the Jackson Course, we discuss how the existing literature was applied as a theoretical repertoire to understand and situate, as well as guide, the operation of the Jackson Course at JJLS. Then we discuss how our subjectivities affected our fieldwork process and detail the data collection process.

3.1 Jackson Japanese Language School JJLS is located in a suburb of a major metropolitan area in the northeast United States. It caters to students who wish to learn Japanese, from preschoolers (three years old) to adults. A private nonprofit organization overseen by a board of trustees chosen by existing board members, the JJLS was originally founded in 1980 as a hoshūkō that also offered classes in JFL. Its funding came1 from tuition fees, Japanese governmental grant (50% of the rent and roughly 50% of the hoshūkō-bu teachers’ salaries),2 and donations from local businesses. JJLS received its first principal sent by MEXT in 1989. In line with Japan’s academic year, the JJLS year started on April 1. The school met 42 Sundays per year from 1:00 pm to 4:20 pm. The school day was divided into four periods with recesses in between, as shown in Table 3.1 below. JJLS also offered optional mathematics classes from 11:50 am to 12:35 pm every Sunday and an optional current affairs class for middle school students between 4:30 pm and 5:15 pm on alternate Sundays. 1 Ethnography describes what ethnographers observed in the specific period of time of his/her fieldwork. Things often change after the fieldwork. To avoid portraying time-specific experience during fieldwork as unchanging qualities of the school and its community, we describe JJLS below in the past tense. 2 Because of the economic downturn, governmental support has recently decreased.

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Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

Activity

Time

Optional mathematics

11:50–12:35

Recess

12:35–1:00

Period 1

1:00–1:45

Recess

1:45–1:50 pm

Period 2

1:50–2:30 pm

Recess

2:30–2:45 pm

Period 3

2:45–3:30 pm

Recess

3:30–3:35 pm

Period 4

3:35–4:20 pm

dismissal

4:20–4:30 pm

Optional Japan-US Current Affairs class

4:30–5:15 pm, alternate weeks

Table 3.1: The JJLS timetable

Recruiting teachers to JJLS posed a challenge. First, the school could hire only those who had an appropriate immigration status or were US citizens. In terms of qualifications, JJLS preferred to hire people with Japan- or US-issued teaching certificates, which was not easy. For the Jackson Course, where teachers’ involvement and effort in curriculum development were essential, Lee and her fellow administrators set an informal guideline: a desirable hire needed to be familiar with both the Japanese and American education systems, have some experience in foreign language education, and be willing to invest time and effort. Once a month, a MEXT-assigned principal led a teacher training seminar for teachers in hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course. The topics usually related to practical pedagogical issues, such as use of visual aids and so forth, and did not focus specifically on teaching Japanese in a non-Japanese environment. The MEXT-assigned principal also allocated the amount of class material to be covered on a given day; individual teachers had a certain amount of flexibility as long as they covered the specified material. On February 10, 2008, for example, the 7th grade hoshūkō-bu class had kanji practice and a kanji quiz in the 1st period, language arts in the 2nd and 3rd periods, and social studies in the 4th period. Content that was not covered during the assigned period was taken up in the following period. In the Jackson Course, time frames allotted for assigned material were more rigid because the students moved to different classes for each period, as will be described later in this chapter.

Jackson Japanese Language School

47

JJLS’s school-age student body fell roughly into three categories according to the length of students’ intended stay in the United States.3 The chūzai “shortterm residence” group included students who would spend three to five years in the United States because of a parent’s intra-company transfer. Japanese tended to be the “first language” of students in this group. The chōki-taizai “long-term residence” group comprised students who expected to stay in the United States for more than five years. Their return to Japan depended on a parent’s transfer within the company. English was usually the common means of communication for chōki-taizai students; they used Japanese only in limited situations, such as at home with their parents or at JJLS. The eijū or “permanent residence” group was students with no plans to live in Japan. Often, Japanese was not a “first language” for one or both of the student’s parents. English tended to be the “first language” of eijū students, who were usually born and raised in the United States. As the number of eiju students increased in the 2000s, JJLS created various programs. A number of major structural changes were effected in 2004, whose process will be described and discussed in detail in Chapter 4. The school’s original hoshūkō program became an independent “first unit” headed by a principal sent by MEXT, while all the other programs were placed in a “second unit” headed by a local administrator, Lee, who served as its principal until March 2012. The second unit housed the preschool/kindergarten, high school, JFL program, and Jackson Course, as Figure 3.1 illustrates below. In April 2012, the hoshūkō-bu had 120 students and the second unit had 151 students. Figure 3.1 shows the basic structure adopted in 2004; levels 3 and 4 of the Jackson Course did not exist prior to 2005. The hoshūkō-bu sought to adhere to the structure of compulsory schooling in Japan as much as possible, with the age of child determining his/her grade level and the MEXT Course of Study determining the curriculum. The Jackson Course, on the other hand, evolved to meet the practical needs of teachers and students; its development thus merits description in the next section. The design and daily operation of both the hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course will be detailed in Chapter 5.

3 These are conventional categories used at hoshūkō in general in the United States (Sato and Kataoka 2008). A fourth group at JJLS studies Japanese as a foreign language, but it is not within the scope of this study.

Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

48

Grade

Second Unit

Pre-K

Preschool Program

K

3–5 years old First Unit 1

Hoshūkō-bu

2

Elementary School

Jackson Course

3

Grades 1–6

Level 2

JFL Program

4

(Grades 2–4)

5

Level 3

6

(Grades 4–6)

7

Middle School

Level 4

8

Grades 7–9

(Grades 7–9)

9

Grades 1–8

JFL Program Grades 9–12

10

High School Program

11

Grades 10–12

and adult

12 Adult Figure 3.1: Structure of JJLS (as of April 2007) The arrows show possible paths of advancement to higher grades and possible transfers to different programs within the school. Transfers between programs result from discussions among a student, his/her parents, and a pertinent teacher/administrator.

3.2 The Jackson Course School administrators and teachers designed the Jackson Course curriculum to be independent of the kokugo curriculum, enabling it to accommodate students (mainly eijū students) who did not wish or need to receive the kokugo education. As Chapter 5 will detail, the Jackson Course curriculum takes a holistic approach and offers flexibility, catering to its students’ specific needs. The medium of instruction is Japanese. Occasionally, English translations are provided for new words. The Jackson Course began in April 2004 as a multi-age class of seven 2nd to 5th grade students. Four of them had transferred from the hoshūkō because they had difficulty keeping up with its curriculum. The other three transferred from

The Jackson Course

49

JFL classes; these students had at least one parent who spoke Japanese language at home and had been placed in the JFL program because they had had no kokugo education prior to attending JJLS. Administrators thought they lacked sufficient BICS to keep up with their grade levels in the hoshūkō. Another multi-age class was introduced in April 2005 to accommodate students with a wide range of ages and Japanese language proficiency. The children were grouped according to age – Level 2 for grades 2–4, Level 3 for grades 4–6. In April 2007, Level 4 was added for middle school students (see Fig. 3.1). Pedagogical and administrative constraints prevented establishment of a class for 1st graders. Assuming that 1st graders entirely lack CALP preparation, the pedagogical constraint was that they could not be placed in the same class with students who had more advanced reading and writing skills; thus they required their own class with a trained teacher. This became an administrative constraint: the school in general had an ongoing problem finding qualified teachers at all, let alone for the Jackson Course. Therefore, training a teacher for this specific class was not realistic. Another administrative constraint was the issue of space: the JJLS was at full capacity in a rented building. Nonetheless, as will be detailed in Chapter 8, the Jackson Course began accepting first graders in April 2012 in response to strong demand among parents. In April 2008, the Jackson Course curriculum was restructured to eliminate level-based class assignment. Instead, as shown in Table 3.2 below, students assembled differently for each period. For the first period, all Jackson Course students were divided into four groups based on their progress in kanji. The Jackson Course developed its own kanji curriculum with kanji groupings inspired by a textbook that Tokyo Gakugei University designed for kikokushijo students (“students who returned to Japan”). There were five kanji categories, A through E. The kanji groupings differed slightly from the MEXT-prescribed Course of Study for kokugo in that they included kanji with similar meanings in the same category. For example, the kokugo curriculum covered the kanji for “mother” in 2nd grade and “father” in 3rd grade, whereas the Jackson Course introduced both kanji in the same grade. Students entering the Jackson Course at the lowest level – after finishing 1st grade in hoshūkō-bu – joined kanji Group B. In 2008– 2009, four kanji classes were learning kanji groups B, C, D, and E.4 For language arts in the second and third periods, students were grouped according to general language proficiency, the teacher’s recommendation, and evaluation by Lee, who observed the students in class and interviewed them when their cases were difficult to assess. The teaching materials for each of the 4 Because the Jackson Course students were assumed to have 1st grade CALP, Group A was not offered.

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Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

proficiency-based classes were set in line with the general linguistic proficiency and cognitive level of the students as judged by Lee and the teachers; thus they could differ from year to year. For the fourth period, students were grouped by age to carry out contentbased projects. Because 6th graders were especially numerous in 2008–2009, one elementary-level class held 2nd to 5th graders and the other class had 6th graders only. The class for middle schoolers stayed the same. Period

Subject: Elementary School (Grades 2–6)

Subject: Middle School (Grades 7–9)

1st

Kanji (four proficiency-based classes for entire Jackson Course)

Kanji (four proficiency-based classes for entire Jackson Course)

2nd & 3rd

Language arts (two proficiency-based classes)

Language arts

4th

Project (two age-based classes)

Project

Table 3.2: Jackson Course elementary and middle school period structure, 2008–2009 academic year

As of April 2008, assessment of students’ linguistic proficiency was required for them to move from the elementary to the middle school level. The assessment included an interview with Lee and Jackson Course teachers, and a reading comprehension test that Lee designed with Jackson Course teachers’ input. Teachers’ recommendations could be considered in this promotion as well. In April 2009, the number of students in middle school increased from seven to twelve, so one more class was added. Student placement mirrored that of the elementary school, i.e., proficiency-based classes for kanji and language arts (see Table 3.3). Period

Subject: Elementary School (Grades 2–6)

Subject: Middle School (Grades 7–9)

1st

Kanji (four proficiency-based classes for entire Jackson Course)

Kanji (four proficiency-based classes for entire Jackson Course)

2nd & 3rd

Language arts (two proficiency-based classes)

Language arts (two proficiency-based classes)

4th

Project (two age-based classes)

Project (same classes as language arts)

Table 3.3: Jackson Course elementary and middle school period structure, 2009–2010 academic year

The Jackson Course

51

In April 2010, the middle school program became the “middle and high school” program because existing middle school students wanted to continue studying Japanese in the Jackson Course rather than move to the existing high school program (see Table 3.4). Period

Subject: Elementary School (Grades 2–6)

Subject: Middle–High School (Grades 7–12)

1st

Kanji (four proficiency-based classes for entire Jackson Course)

Kanji (four proficiency-based classes for entire Jackson Course)

2nd & 3rd

Language arts (two proficiency-based classes)

Language arts (two proficiency-based classes)

4th

Project (two age-based classes)

Project (same classes as language arts)

Table 3.4: Jackson Course elementary and middle–high school period structure, 2010–2011 academic year

One of the goals of the middle school program and especially of the Jackson Course was to prepare students for the Advanced Placement (AP) Japanese examination. AP examinations are administered every May by the College Board, a not-for-profit membership association founded in 1900 to connect high school students to colleges in the United States. It is composed of more than 5,700 schools, colleges, and educational organizations. Students take AP examinations primarily to earn college credit for the subject and gain an advantage in the college admission process. Preparatory courses are not requisite for students wishing to take the AP examination, but many high schools offer year long AP courses all the same. Learning in AP courses and familiarizing oneself with college-level study are considered additional benefits. As of the 2010–2011 school year, there were AP examinations in thirty subjects, including art history, biology, world history, physics, and various languages.5 AP examinations in Japanese and Chinese were added in 2007. When the College Board first announced AP Japanese, Lee and the Jackson Course teachers started incorporating the kanji covered in the AP Japanese examination into the kanji curriculum. As of April 2010, any high school student who wished to take the AP Japanese examination could attend a preparatory class for the AP Japanese examination in the second period every other week. The class was part of the high school curriculum in the Jackson Course, but it was open for the students in the high school program for US college-bound students. Teachers in the high school program cooperated to make the course 5 http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/about.html. Accessed 21 July 2010.

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Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

available. This continuous evolution of the Jackson Course can be summarized as below (Table 3.5). Academic year

Description

2004–2005

One class for multi-aged students (grades 2–6)

2005–2006

One class was added to make Level 2 for grades 2–4 and Level 3 for grades 4–6.

2006–2007

No change

2007–2008

A class for middle school students was added: Level 4 for grades 7–9.

2008–2009

Curriculum was restructured and “levels” terminated. Grade 2–6 students were placed in one of two classes based on their proficiency and age.

2009–2010

Another class was added for middle school.

2010–2011

Two middle school classes became a middle/high school program for grades 7–12.

2011–2012

No change

Table 3.5: Summary of changes made to the Jackson Course, 2004–2011 academic years

3.3 JJLS, heritage language research, and keishōgo vs. heritage language As mentioned in Chapter 1, the question of how to deal with eijū students at hoshūkō is not unique to JJLS. Since the 1990s, many hoshūkō across North America have faced the different needs of increasing numbers of eijū students and attempted to offer classes in addition to the hoshūkō curriculum. However, the Jackson Course was rather unusual because although it was an independent alternative to the hoshūkō program, the two coexisted within the same school, contrasting kokugo and keishōgo education. Thus students and parents could choose between two programs: hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course. Here, although both hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course provided heritage language education in the sense that both taught Japanese in the United States, we focus on the difference between kokugo (education for “native speakers”) and keishōgo (education of “heritage language learners”) as perceived by those at Japanese language schools. JJLS’s pioneering attempt to build a course for keishōgo learners alongside hoshūkō-bu attracted attention and visitors from other weekend Japanese language schools. In response to this interest, some of the teachers in the Jackson

JJLS, heritage language research, and keishōgo vs. heritage language

53

Course shared their lesson plans, as mentioned, in local workshops and professional conferences, including regional-level meetings for teachers and administrators of weekend Japanese language schools and national-level meetings for researchers and practitioners, such as that of ACTFL. Most of these lesson plan presentations targeted other Japanese language teachers, the medium being Japanese.6 Some of the Jackson Course’s administrators and teachers were with graduate degrees in fields such as linguistics, language education, and cross-cultural communication. Their knowledge of language education in general was an asset in the establishment and development of the Jackson Course. The teachers in the Jackson Course were very dedicated; however, there were limits to what the school could demand from them. After all, JJLS was a weekend language school. Lee tried to circulate appropriate and accessible articles and books among the teachers and held meetings to address pedagogical issues specific to HL education, but this was never done systematically. In the absence of a model of teaching Japanese as a heritage language, the administrators and teachers created the Jackson Course curriculum by combining their knowledge of language education in general, existing kokugo and JFL teaching resources, and “authentic” reading material. It was modified and revised around what worked or did not with the specific group of students in the Jackson Course each year. According to Lee, it was coincidental that the curriculum accorded with what researchers such as Douglas (2005) have generally suggested for heritage language education. Take for example the phenomenon called language shyness (Krashen 1998), mentioned in Chapter 2. It occurs when heritage language learners feel awkward in foreign language classes because instructors and classmates expect them to perform like “native speakers”. The heritage language learner who is unable to do so may develop an inferiority complex and even abandon learning the target language altogether. Krashen argues that creating a separate space for heritage language learners can be beneficial, especially if the class provides comprehensible input, such as grammatical mistakes typical of heritage language learners, that some heritage language learners are unlikely to obtain in an informal environment.

6 The purpose of our research differs from this involvement of administrators and teachers in research communities. Ours is designed to see things from an angle other than program/ curriculum building and to present it in the wider research communities. We have published to an audience of researchers of Asian studies (Doerr and Lee 2010), education (Doerr and Lee 2012, under review), and heritage language education in general (Doerr and Lee 2009).

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Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

The Jackson Course was aimed at offering such a space free from “language shyness”. As an administrator, Lee envisioned this course as a space where students could study Japanese comfortably without feeling awkward or insecure among “native speakers” from Japan. Interviews with Jackson Course students and parents indicated that this goal was met. For example, Mayumi stated that “the class size is small, and I can ask questions without feeling embarrassed compared to when I was in hoshūkō-bu. There, I could not ask questions because the students were mostly from Japan and their Japanese was good”. Her mother said Mayumi had “got more confident”. Mrs. Jones reported that “my daughter was not very eager to do presentations, but in Jackson Course, she became less fearful about giving a presentation in class” (see Chapter 6 for details). However, the administrators who designed the Jackson Course were unaware of Krashen’s concept of “language shyness” at the time. They had first hand knowledge of the phenomenon from observing classes and talking to students and parents. In other words, the pioneering keishōgo program offered at JJLS, the Jackson Course, was initiated by pragmatic concerns at JJLS, not heritage language research. As discussed in Chapter 2, in the late 1990s the field was just emerging, and there were no specific models to follow. Administrators, especially Lee, became familiar with existing theories of heritage language as the Jackson Course developed and through the process of collaborating in this project. This research, and her understanding of students’ and parents’ perceptions of language education, gained through collaborating in this project, brought Lee to realize that the relationship between an individual and his or her “heritage” language is personal and cannot be judged only from the “expert” vantage point of linguistic proficiency. Lee once thought certain students were better served by the Jackson Course than by hoshūkō-bu because of the Jackson Course’s high teacher-student ratio and greater opportunity for involvement in class activities; she often questioned some parents’ and students’ decisions not to choose the Jackson Course. However, she never forced students into the Jackson Course but left it up to the students and parents to decide. At JJLS, students or parents considering the Jackson Course contacted Lee, who, after an interview, would suggest a one-day trial class in the Jackson Course if she thought the student would benefit from that program. Sometimes a student did not feel comfortable in the trial class. A parent of such a student once told Lee that the child felt very insecure having to actively engage in such a small class. In hoshūkō-bu, classes were often conducted in the lecture style, and teachers often did not have time to involve students in class activities because they had to cover the government-prescribed quantity of material. This particular student found it more comfortable to always be on the receiving end.

JJLS, heritage language research, and keishōgo vs. heritage language

55

In another case, parents who had observed a Jackson Course class were eager for their children to be enrolled, but the students absolutely refused because they wanted to be seen as studying among “native speakers” in the “upper-track” [hoshūkō-bu] program. Lee also encountered a case in which a student who once had refused to switch despite her parent’s suggestion decided later to switch to the Jackson Course when her close friend switched. These experiences and this research confirmed Lee’s belief that the decision to join the Jackson Course should come from students and parents themselves. That is, it was not just the match of linguistic proficiency that mattered to students and parents. More issues were at stake: their sense of belonging, future plans, peer relations, scheduling, and the kinds of occasions on which the student used Japanese. We discuss Lee’s experience further in Chapter 8. The JJLS administrators used their knowledge of research to situate the Jackson Course in the wider notion of heritage language education. Vocabularies derived from two approaches in heritage language research, discussed in Chapter 2, can be used to describe situations at JJLS to some degree. The linguistic proficiency approach can be used to describe the Jackson Course, as the goal of its curriculum was the students’ attainment of some CALP. To meet the demands of such a curriculum, students had to come to the Jackson Course with BICS generally appropriate to their age. The threshold to the Jackson Course was thus mastery of age-appropriate BICS. This corresponds to the notion of “heritage language learners” as defined by the linguistic-proficiency-based approach (Valdés 2001). The linguistic-proficiency definition contributed significantly to differentiating the Jackson Course from both hoshūkō-bu and JFL programs. Jackson Course students corresponded, although not necessarily, to the linguistic-proficiency-based definition of heritage language learner in terms of their bilingualism, as most Jackson Course students were proficient in English. One of the students in the course commented, “In regular school, I know all the language and I can form questions better”. This is a crucial contrast to hoshūkō-bu and JFL, in which English/Japanese bilingualism is not expected. The self-esteem approach is also applicable to describe the situation at JJLS to some degree. For example, as we show in Chapter 5, some eijū students felt positive about knowing Japanese – regardless of proficiency – in relation to their American friends in English-medium American schools. However, certain complex perceptions of the Jackson Course within JJLS cannot be explained by existing research framework. The contrast between the linguistic proficiency and self-esteem approaches hinges on the regime of difference in which heritage language learners are situated. In the former approach, the regime of difference is that of hoshūkō-bu vs. Jackson

56

Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

Course vs. JFL student, or kokugo vs. keishōgo vs. JFL student; in the latter, the regime of difference is that of mainstream English monolingual American vs. Japanese as minority language speakers. JJLS administrators took the linguisticproficiency approach for pedagogical purposes. However, describing the students, and thus interpellating them, was a very complex issue. The heart of the matter was the students’ subjectivity. In the early 2000s, around the time JJLS was contemplating creating a class for eijū students in the lower elementary grades, the term heritage language came into use among researchers and practitioners. When the administrators introduced the Japanese translation of the term, keishōgo, to the JJLS community around that same time, many parents were unfamiliar with it. They thought keishōgo education was for “Japanese-Americans”. Because almost all the parents in hoshūkō at the time came from Japan, they did not consider themselves and their children “Japanese-American”.7 After that, the JJLS administrators referred to the program’s target students as “children of kokusai kekkon” (international marriage) or long-term visitors to the United States (chōki-taizai and eijū students). The administrators’ ambivalence about using the term keishōgo at JJLS played a role in the naming of the course as well. When it was established, it was commonly called chūkan kōsu “in-between course”, i.e., the course between hoshūkō and JFL, reflecting the linguistic-proficiency-based regime of difference. When this course was launched in April 2004, its official name was still undecided; sometimes it was called shin kōsu “new course”. After much contemplation among administrators, Lee suggested the name Jackson Course, which was adopted in 2005. The name of the program never officially included the term keishōgo, unlike other keishōgo programs, such as the Washington Keishōgo Center. Even as we write this book, “keishōgo” appears only occasionally in the official course description for parents, although the administrators and the teachers of Jackson Course use the term regularly. For the MEXT, a program independent of the MEXT Course of Study and bearing the label keishōgo posed a problem of legitimacy in the spending of Japan’s tax money, as Chapter 4 will elaborate. An easier-track hoshūkō class would have been acceptable, but not a separate program under the name of keishōgo, which suggested students had no apparent plan to return to Japan. Therefore, the question became the meaning of the new subjectivity of “heritage language learner”. School administrators and teachers saw it as involving

7 In contrast, once the Jackson Course was on track to become a full-fledged program, two parents of Jackson Course students told Lee they wished the school would name the course specifically “Japanese as a Heritage Language” to make clear that it was not just an easier version of hoshūkō-bu but had completely different purposes and goals.

Ethnographic fieldwork at JJLS and subjectivities of the authors

57

linguistic proficiency as well as “language shyness” in the presence of “native speakers”. MEXT officials focused on whether this kind of education deserved Japan’s tax money (Chapter 4). As for students and parents, it involved their future educational aspirations, sense of belonging, linguistic proficiency, and family background (Chapter 6). Contestation and negotiation over labels referring to students’ subjectivities are performative acts that cite regimes of difference to categorize keishōgo learners. As we discuss in detail in Chapter 6, students’ and parents’ resistance to being interpellated as “dropouts” or “keishōgo learners” influenced the naming of the Jackson Course as well as the course description for prospective students’ parents. That is, JJLS responded to these developments at school without a theoretical framework to analyze them. We contend that in this area, the research needs to catch up. JJLS offered an ideal site for such studies because kokugo and keishōgo programs coexisted there, offering students and parents alternatives and thus giving them opportunities to ponder the subjectivities each program suggested. Existing research on heritage language education does not discuss such varieties of heritage language education as exist in the Japanese case, where one kind of heritage language education (kokugo education in hoshūkō) is not regarded as heritage language education. Existing research on Japanese as a heritage language does not clearly analyze the relations between heritage language as an analytical framework and the folk term keishōgo (see Chinen and Tucker 2005; Douglas 2005). This situation reflects the general trend in existing research on heritage language, which takes the existence of the heritage language learner for granted. Existing research fails to analyze heritage language learners as constructed through acts of interpellation by researchers, school administrators, and teachers. It also falls short of examining the process of contestation and negotiations among researchers, as well as students and parents who ponder their relation to the Japanese language. The rest of this volume relies on ethnographic field work to illustrate the construction of heritage language learners in this context and make theoretical and practical suggestions for JJLS and similar schools.

3.4 Ethnographic fieldwork at JJLS and subjectivities of the authors The ethnographic method allows us to understand the processes and results of learning from individual students’ perspectives and grasp how they are situated in their personal histories as well as in the context of utterance. It gives voice to

58

Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

individuals’ viewpoints, which otherwise might not be heard, and reveals the processes by which their subjectivities are negotiated and contested. Clifford (1986: 41–42) points out that it is “necessary to conceive of ethnography not as the experience and interpretation of a circumscribed ‘other’ reality, but rather as a constructive negotiation involving at least two, and usually more, conscious, politically significant subjects [. . .] There is no neutral standpoint in the power-laden field of discursive positionings, in a shifting matrix of relationships.” Our position as researchers involved us in the regime of power and knowledge that constitutes power relations between those who create and manage the knowledge and those who become the object of knowledge, as discussed in Chapter 1 (Foucault 1972). The authors were active in the JJLS school community in multiple ways, having been part of the community before starting the fieldwork.8 Doerr was a substitute teacher at JJLS, although she did not teach any classes pertinent to this research. At JJLS it was common to turn to parents when other teachers were hard to find, as was often the case. For example, in the 2009–2010 academic year, 20 of 28 teachers were parents of JJLS students. As mentioned, Lee, a trained linguist, headed the second education unit from April 2004 to March 2012. Her predecessor in the post had laid the ground for the Jackson Course in 2004 and she continued this work, leading the course’s development. Her position as an administrator afforded us in-depth understanding of the personal investments and struggles behind the formation of the Jackson Course. We suspect these subject positions were key to gaining the trust of participating teachers and parents, which meant that obtaining permission to do research was easier for us than it would have been for researchers outside the school community. We also suspect Lee’s position of authority may have exerted a certain pressure on some people to participate in our research. Doerr’s and Lee’s own children were enrolled at JJLS during the project period. Though they were not among the target students in the research, this subject position brought us close to other parents, as we shared similar concerns about children and school, and worked together as parent volunteers. For the students, our position as parents lessened the impact of our presence as researchers but increased their concerns about privacy, though from time to time

8 Our membership in the school community prior to the fieldwork made us “native anthropologists”. However, this concept has been criticized for its reliance on a simplistic insider/ outsider dichotomy and its dismissal of the “multiple planes of identification” that apply to any individual (Narayan 1993: 676; also see Reed-Danahay 1997).

Collecting data

59

we reassured them that anonymity would be strictly maintained. In these ways, our multiple positions provided us with various entry points even as they created certain constraints on our research.

3.5 Collecting data The data discussed in this study were collected over the four years and two months of our project, from February 2007 to March 2011. The target groups we chose to follow for four years were the students who were in the 6th grade (ages 11 and 12) hoshūkō-bu class and Level 3 (ages 9 to 12) of the Jackson Course in the academic year from April 2006 to March 2007. We obtained the written consent of all the students and parents who participated in this project. School administrators and teachers who participated in the project also signed written consent forms. Strict confidentiality was promised. As Table 3.6 shows below, the 6th grade hoshūkō-bu class in the 2006–2007 academic year consisted of 16 (four chūzai, four chōki-taizai, and eight eijū) students as of April 2006. 10 (three chūzai, two chōki-taizai, and five eijū) students, nine of their parents, and one more parent (whose child opted not to participate) from this class participated in our research. The level 3 Jackson Course class held five students – four eijū and one chōki-taizai Korean student.9 All the students and parents from this class participated in the research. See Appendix 8 for the list of students who participated in this research. When the new Japanese academic year began in April 2007, one hoshūkō-bu student left school, another hoshūkō-bu student returned to Japan, and three hoshūkō-bu students moved to Level 4 of the Jackson Course. Two new students joined the hoshūkō-bu class. Three out of five Level 3 Jackson Course students moved to Level 4. They were joined by three students from hoshūkō-bu. In April 2007 there thus were 14 7th grade hoshūkō-bu students and eight Level 4 Jackson Course students. In April 2008, there were 13 8th grade hoshūkō-bu students and seven Level 4 Jackson Course students. In April 2009, there were 13 9th grade hoshūkō-bu students and 12 students in the entire Jackson Course middle school program. In April 2010, there were 11 10th grade students in the default high school program and 17 in the entire middle–high school program for Jackson Course students (See Table 3.6 for summary).

9 The Korean student had moved from a JFL course because of a scheduling conflict.

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Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

Year

Hoshūkō-bu

Chūzai

Chōki-taizai

Eijū

Total

April 2006

6th grade

4

4

8

16

April 2007

7th grade

5

3

6

14

April 2008

8th grade

5

3

5

13

April 2009

9th grade

8

2

3

13

April 2010

10th grade

5

2

4

11

Jackson Course April 2006

Level 3

0

1

4

5

April 2007

Level 4

0

1

7

8

April 2008

Middle school

0

0

7

7

April 2009

Middle school

0

0

12

12

April 2010

Middle–high school

0

0

17

17

Table 3.6: Number of students of the target class and their movement by category

We interviewed students, parents, and teachers. As Table 3.7 demonstrates, out of the 16 6th grade hoshūkō-bu students in April 2006, we conducted the first interview for 10 students and 10 parents between February 2007 and February 2008. We also conducted the first interview for all five students in the Level 3 Jackson Course and their parents in this period (see Appendices 1 and 3 for the actual questions we asked). The second interviews were done in January and February of 2011 with two hoshūkō-bu students and two parents, and six Jackson Course students and three parents. Two parents were interviewed in March and April of 2012 – after the research period – due to scheduling conflicts. Other interviewees included all the teachers who taught the classes we observed (see Appendix 5 for the questionnaire questions), one student who subsequently left hoshūkō-bu and his parent in March 2007 and another such student in March 2010 (see Appendices 6 and 7 for the questionnaire questions), and one Jackson Course student and his parent when the student moved from JFL classes to the Jackson Course in July 2008. We also selected some students and parents to be interviewed on particular topics. For example, as described in Chapter 6, we interviewed two students and their parents after the students had moved from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course. Other interviewees selected were two former JJSL administrators, and one MEXT-sent and two local teachers, as presented in Chapter 4.

61

Collecting data

Type of interview

Dates

Program

General First:

February 2007– February 2008

Hoshūkō-bu

Second:

January/February 2011

General First:

Same as above

Jackson Course

Second: Occasional (program change)

February and January 2009

Occasional November 2009 (left school) March 2010 February 2011 Occasional (program change)

October 2007

Number of Number of Number of Number of students parents teachers administrators

10

10

3**

2

5

5

6

5***

5*

3*

Hoshūkō-bu ! 2 Jackson Course

2

0

1

1

0

1

1

1

1

JFL ! 1 Jackson Course

1

Hoshūkō-bu then left JJLS

0

Occasional December 2008 (additional January 2011 information) Total number of interviews

1 2 30

28

8

3

Table 3.7: Interviews * Teachers were interviewed every year during that academic year. ** These numbers are small because three students left the school before the time of the second interview. The students who left were interviewed right before or after they left and are listed under “occasional (left school)”. *** Two parents were interviewed on March and April of 2012 due to scheduling conflict.

We asked interviewees a standard set of questions regarding their family background, how they came to live in the United States, their experiences at JJLS, their experience of dialects of Japanese, their views on hoshūkō-bu and Jackson Course, and their own and their family members’ ethnic “identities”. Interviews were carried out before or after class in the school’s library or lobby, or in an empty classroom. We took notes and audio-recorded interviews upon permission. Interviewees had a choice of language (English or Japanese) as the medium of the interview. The authors translated interviews done in Japanese into English for this volume. Interviews lasted from about fifteen minutes to

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Ethnographic fieldwork at Jackson Japanese Language School

three hours. All interviews were carried out by either Doerr or Lee, except for two at which both of us were present. Both Doerr and Lee are fluent in English and Japanese, but fieldwork was conducted mainly in Japanese. Doerr also carried out participant observation in classrooms, making audio recordings and taking fieldnotes. She observed 3 sessions of hoshūkō-bu classes and 3 sessions of Jackson Course classes from February to March 2007; 6 in hoshūkō-bu and 7 in the Jackson Course from April 2007 to March 2008; 3 in hoshūkō-bu and 3 in the Jackson Course from April 2008 to March 2009; 12 in hoshūkō-bu and 7 in the Jackson Course from April 2009 to March 2010; and 4 in hoshūkō-bu and 6 in the Jackson Course from April to March 2011, for a total of 54 sessions. Differences in the numbers of class observations each year reflect the teachers’ flexibility in allowing class observation as well as the frequency with which substitute teachers were teaching the classes. For example, the 2008– 2009 hoshūkō-bu teacher preferred walk-ins, which facilitated observation whenever Doerr had some spare time, whereas the Jackson Course teacher of 2008– 2009 often had substitute teachers and preferred the observation to take place by appointment. Also, Doerr’s position as a “class parent” for her daughter’s class in 2008–2009 engaged her in much volunteer work at school, resulting in a reduced number of class observations. The following chapters analyze data we collected through this fieldwork.

4 Betwixt and between Japanese and the heritage language learner of Japanese 4.1 Transplanted virtual “Japan”, or Japanese school for the local community? Who JJLS was supposed to serve was not always a given but had to be negotiated. In the previous chapter, we described how the Jackson Course (keishōgo education) came to be developed within an existing hoshūkō (kokugo education), mostly in response to the needs of the changing student body, which increasingly included students who might never return (or go to live) in Japan. This development accorded with the founders’ philosophy, which held that the school should be rooted in its local community, not devoted exclusively to the children of business migrant sojourners from Japan. However, because JJLS had been an approved hoshūkō, the Jackson Course’s development put the school in a space of tension between being a transplanted “Japan” (hoshūkō) and a program serving the local community in the United States (the Jackson Course), a space somewhat similar to what García et al. (2013) call “bilingual community education”. Biligual community education aims at bilingualism rather than the maintenance of a heritage language and emphasizes the community aspect by employing administrators and teachers from the particular bilingual community. However, while it emphasized community, the Jackson Course did not aim to develop both Japanese and English in students. Rather, English was permitted and seen as resource in gaining proficiency in Japanese, whereas in hoshūkō English was seen as hindrance to learning Japanese. As a transplanted virtual “Japan” (hoshūkō), JJLS followed Japanese government policy regarding children of Japanese citizens overseas, as explained in Chapter 3, in order to provide instruction via the same curriculum used in schools in Japan, based on the Course of Study developed by the MEXT. As a school rooted in its local community in the United States, JJLS was run by local people who were mainly of Japanese ancestry and aimed to serve local students whose lives centered on American schooling but who also wished to learn Japanese. As the student body changed, the push to cater to the local students’ needs grew, and by the mid 2000s the Japanese government began to see the local response to the situation as problematic. We argue the main issue here was whether JJLS was for “Japanese” students who had rights and obligations to Japanese society and thus were worth Japan’s tax money (hoshūkō education), or for heritage language learners of Japanese

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Betwixt and between Japanese and the heritage language learner of Japanese

who were bilingual, rooted in American society, and somehow connected to Japan, yet did not have rights or obligations to Japanese society (keishōgo education; flexible education to meet local needs). By examining the ways representatives of the MEXT (i.e., MEXT-sent principals) and local administrators negotiated who JJLS was for and the resulting institutional transformations, this chapter outlines the process of constructing the “Japanese” student and the keishōgo student (heritage language learner of Japanese) at the level of the institution, whose daily operations will be described in detail in Chapter 5. Issues arising from the gap between the policy of the homeland government and its local implementation in minority language schools have rarely been discussed in studies of heritage language education. The specificity of hoshūkō in comparison to other minority language schools is the involvement of its homeland government, as mentioned. Because not many homeland governments intervene in the education of citizens and their children abroad as intensely as in Japanese case (see Curdt-Christiansen 2008; Otcu 2010a; 2010b), policy discussions usually focus exclusively on government policies on minority language maintenance within the host country (e.g., Hubner and Davis 1999, Pavlenko 2002). The research on hoshūkō contains few studies of how Japanese government policies are interpreted and implemented by local administrators, especially when they involve a teacher sent by the government to oversee language instruction based on the MEXT guidelines,1 despite the fact that diversification of the student body has become common to all hoshūkō. This chapter addresses this gap between the government policies concerning education for Japanese citizens’ children overseas and the diverse needs of students by focusing especially on negotiations between MEXT representatives and local administrators, which constructed who the “Japanese” students were and who the heritage language learners of Japanese were in the administrators’ minds, thus providing a setting designed to cater to these different types of students (for in-depth discussion of the policy implementation, see Lee and Doerr under review). In what follows, we first outline the changes in Japanese government policies on the education of Japanese citizens’ children overseas since the 1960s. Then we present the struggles of the local JJLS founders and administrators, and the principals deployed by the Japanese government, as the school sought to respond

1 Shibata’s study (2000) describes the process of opening a Japanese Saturday school and briefly mentions that the school was approved by the Japanese government and thus was eligible to receive financial support. However, the MEXT did not send teachers or a principal to that school, and there was no discussion on the relationship between MEXT-sent and local teachers and administrators.

Japanese government policies on hoshūkō

65

to the changing student body while still maintaining the status of hoshūkō with a principal deployed by the Japanese government.

4.2 Japanese government policies on hoshūkō As outlined in Chapter 1, hoshūkō provide “Japanese” children in the 1st to 9th grades with instruction corresponding to Japan’s compulsory education in subjects such as language arts, math, and social studies. They are found mainly in the developed countries of Europe and North America (Sato 1997). Prior to the early 1960s, there was no government policy on full-time Japanese schools or weekend Japanese language schools abroad. In 1962, the Japanese government started deploying certified administrators (principals and vice principals) to nihonjin-gakkō (full-time schools for Japanese people) abroad. Under these administrators, education in Japanese schools abroad began to follow the Japanese government’s Course of Study, designed for schools in Japan (Sato 1997). According to Sato (1997), the Japanese government’s policy toward hoshūkō has been consistent thereafter: they are to give the children the same education they would have received in Japan, as far as possible. The Japanese government provides education for Japanese citizens’ children under Article 26 of the Japanese Constitution, which guarantees free compulsory education for Japanese children between the ages of 6 and 15. Therefore, their policies have always been based on building “a good Japanese national”. To this end they export the same kokugo curriculum used for schoolchildren in Japan to these schools abroad, and send teachers trained to teach in public elementary and middle schools in Japan to hoshūkō that reach a certain size. As Japan’s economy grew in the early 1970s, more and more companies began to send employees abroad with their families. According to data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2010), “Japanese” children living abroad numbered 8,662 in 1971 and had increased to over 30,000 a decade later. The first hoshūkō was established in 1958 in Washington, DC. As the number of these children rose, the number of full-time and weekend Japanese schools increased rapidly. The first certified teacher in the United States was deployed to a New York hoshūkō in 1974. Also in that year, Chūō kyōiku shingikai “the Central Education Committee”,2 one of the official committees of the MEXT, proposed governmental support for hoshūkō as follows:

2 chūō kyōiku shingikai 中央教育審議会

66

Betwixt and between Japanese and the heritage language learner of Japanese

Support to hoshū-jugyōkō 3: (1) Hoshū-jugyōkō is a part-time educational institution that offers Japanese children overseas education such as that in Japanese language arts while they attend local schools. Their operation is not always easy; therefore support for these institutions should be drastically increased by subsidizing items such as teachers’ salaries, rental fees, educational materials, and so on. (2) Additional certified teachers should be deployed, similar to full-time Japanese schools, and the training of local teachers should be encouraged.4 (MEXT, 1992a: 297–298; English translation by Lee)

In the 1980s, a change was made to the stated aim of education of “Japanese” children overseas: the importance of local settings was added. The context was the aforementioned increase in the number of hoshūkō – approximately ten new schools per year – reflecting the increased number of Japanese employees sent abroad due to Japan’s increasingly strong economy and strong currency (yen). Following this trend, in 1987 the MEXT formed Rinji kyōiku shingigai “the Ad Hoc Education Committee5 ”, which came up with a statement entitled “Reforms in Response to Internationalization6”. One point of reform relevant to this chapter is as follows: Regarding education of Japanese children overseas, while placing importance on building their foundation as Japanese citizens, effort should be made for them to gain experience from the local setting. Also, appropriate educational institutions should be prepared to accommodate for the increasing number of high-school-age children.7 (MEXT, 1987; English translation by Lee; emphasis added)

However, no concrete measures were taken to implement this policy so that Japanese children overseas could in fact “gain experience from the local setting”.

3 The official name of hoshūkō is hoshū-jugyōkō. However, it is conventionally called by its abbreviated form, hoshūkō. We follow this convention throughout this volume. We use hoshū-jugyōkō only when citing official documents. 4 Original text in Japanese is as follows: 2. 補習授業校に対する助成 (1)補習授業校は、海 外子女が現地の学校に通学するかたわら、日本語教育などを中心とする教育を施す定時 制の教育施設であるが、その運営は必ずしも容易ではないので、講師給与、施設借料、 教材整備等に要する経費の一部を補助するなど、これに対する助成を画期的に拡充する こと。(2)日本人学校に準じた教員派遣を実現するとともに、教員に対する現地研修会も 積極的に催すこと。 5 rinji kyōiku shingikai 臨時教育審議会 6 kokusaika e no taiō no tame no kaikaku 国際化への対応の為の改革 7 The original text in Japanese is as follows: 海外子女教育については、日本人としての基 礎の育成を重視しつつ、それぞれの地域の実情なども勘案しながら、できる限り現地で 得られる経験を多く積ませるという基本的方向に従って、その在り方を工夫する。 また、子女数の増大している高等学校段階に対する適切な教育施設を講ずる。

Japanese government policies on hoshūkō

67

The MEXT curriculum designed for schools in Japan continued to be emphasized, and there was no special consideration for students whose experience was rooted more in local life than in Japanese life, such as those who were born and/or raised in the United States. As the number of children enrolled in hoshūkō increased, the Research Study Group on Education of Japanese Children Overseas8, another MEXT committee, made the following proposal, entitled Hoshū-jugyōkō no arikata “The Condition of Supplementary Schools9 ” in 1992: Hoshū-jugyōkō are facing a big turning point: while they are expected to expand their roles according to changes of the era and requests of parents, they should reexamine their goals and existence in relation to other educational institutions and the local community, and explore their future roles and existence. Proposal: 1. Clarify the purpose and goals of education 2. Improve the curriculum and pedagogy 3. Strengthen guidance for students 4. Strengthen teachers’ organization 5. Increase outreach to local communities (MEXT, 1992b; English translation by Lee; emphasis added)10

The above proposals show that the Japanese government’s policies regarding children overseas started to change in order to adjust to the changes of the early 1990s, although the basic stance that this education was for Japanese citizens has never changed. In the early 1990s, the student body began to grow more diverse for two reasons. First, given the adverse economic situation due to the bursting of the “bubble economy” in Japan, many Japanese companies began deploying their employees for longer stints to reduce the cost of transporting families abroad. Rather than calling them back within 3–4 years, they began keeping them abroad for more than 5 years, and sometimes for 10 years (Kataoka 2008). Second, the number of children of interracial and intercultural couples increased. According to statistics from 2005 (Ministry of Health, Labour, and

8 kaigai shijo kyōiku ni kansuru chōsa kenkyūkai 海外子女教育に関する調査研究会 9 hoshū-jugyōkō no arikata 補習授業校の在り方 10 The original text in Japanese is as follows: . . . 補習授業校は、時代の推移や保護者の要 望等により、その役割を拡大しつつある一方、他の教育施設や現地社会とのかかわりの 中で、その果たすべき役割や存在意識を検討し、今日的状況の中でのあるべき姿を改め て模索していかなければならないという大きな転換点を迎えている…5つの提言： ①教育の目的 e 目標の明確化、②教育内容 e 方法の改善、③生徒指導 e 進路指導の 充実、④教員組織の充実、⑤現地社会への貢献。

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Welfare 2006), kokusai kekkon ‘international marriage’, or marriage between a Japanese citizen and a non-Japanese citizen, rose from fewer than 10,000 couples in 1980 to more than 40,000 in 2005. In the late 1990s, the term kokusai-ji ‘international children’, or children of Japanese and non-Japanese parents, started appearing frequently in government reports and scholarly literature. This term includes all the children of marriage between Japanese and non-Japanese citizens, but their trend toward growth was also reflected in the number of such children residing in the United States. However, the MEXT took no concrete initiatives to address this changes at the institutional level. In sum, Japanese government policy on the education of children of Japanese citizens abroad has changed since the 1960s to reflect changes in both domestic and international contexts surrounding hoshūkō: from merely transporting the Japanese curriculum based on the MEXT Course of Study to the United States, to enriching students’ Japanese education by taking advantage of the local culture. However, practical measures to incorporate such regional culture were absent, as were attempts to cater to students whose lives were centered on local culture. Despite amending its policies, the Japanese government did not change its approach to hoshūkō, which remains education of Japanese nationals who will return to Japan in the near future.

4.3 Adapting to a changing student body at the local level Whereas the MEXT did not take concrete official measures to adjust to the changing student body and its needs, local administration sought various ways to adjust to the change with a focus on two areas. The first was the status of the “international children”: whether they should be considered “Japanese” and thus included among the students targeted by hoshūkō education. This was an important consideration in the MEXT’s decision on whether to deploy teachers and/or principals to a school. As mentioned, part of the support the MEXT provides hoshūkō is in the form of teachers and/or principals sent from Japan to schools with more than 100 “Japanese” students. Counting the “Japanese” children enrolled in a school to qualify it for this deployment is critical to hoshūko because these teachers bring in the most recent knowledge and information about education in Japan. Also, local administrators saw these MEXTsent teachers and principals as enhancing direct ties to Japan and Japanese education as well as serving as the Japanese government’s seal of approval. However, the criteria for defining who was considered “Japanese” were quite arbitrary. While the Japanese government defined “Japanese” children as those without permanent residency in the United States and those who planned to return to Japan, such criteria did not capture the shifting reality of Japanese

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families in the United States, who could change their plans and, accordingly, their children’s future residence. For example, some families who stayed in the United States longer than they expected ended up attaining permanent residency in the United States. When their children became high school students, they may have started considering sending them to college in the United States. In these cases, then, children who once were considered “Japanese” no longer were, after several years. Other families who planned to stay in the United States permanently may have ended up returning to Japan for personal and family reasons. In view of these mutable circumstances, counting the number of “Japanese” students was left to the MEXT-sent principal’s discretion. Local administrators often needed to work with the MEXT-sent principal to ensure that the increasing number of students whose future plans were unclear would be counted toward the 100 students needed to receive a MEXT-sent principal. The second area of focus was the curriculum catering to this increased diversity. Back when most of the students who went to these schools conformed to the original target of hoshūkō – students whose first language was Japanese and who would return to Japan in several years – the MEXT-based curriculum worked. But it did not work as well when the students’ language background became more diverse. To bridge this gap, each hoshūkō responded differently. Some made a decision to cater only to children who were in the United States for a short period of time. This meant ignoring the needs of students who were born and raised in the United States and had little Japanese language background.11 Others provided supplemental instruction within the MEXT-based curriculum for those with less proficiency in Japanese. Still other hoshūkō decided to create their own curricula, independent of the MEXT-based curriculum. Such programs are called keishōgo (heritage language) programs. Independent keishōgo schools were developed in some United States cities (Chinen 2004).12 A keishōgo program could also exist side by side with a hoshūkō program within a school, as the case of JJLS. However, establishment of such a separate school for keishōgo education required a critical mass of students. Thus, children living outside metropolitan areas who needed any kind of Japanese language instruction often turned to the nearest hoshūkō, whether it specifically addressed their needs or not. Which approach a school chose depended on three issues. The first was size. If the school was small, it made no financial sense to create even supplemental classes alongside the usual classes in hoshūkō, let alone an independent 11 For example, Washington hoshūkō followed this pattern. 12 One example is the establishment in 2004 of the Washington Japanese Heritage Center, separate from the Washington hoshūkō. See www.keisho.org/ Accessed 15 May 2009.

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keishōgo program for students who did not plan to return to Japan. The second issue was the characteristics of the operating body. In New York and Chicago, for example, Japanese Chambers of Commerce were heavily involved in operation of hoshūkō. Because their main interest was the well-being of their member companies’ employees based in those cities, they supported the MEXT-prescribed curriculum. The third issue was the personal stance of MEXT-sent principals. Whether the MEXT-sent principals were adamant about strictly following the MEXT-based curriculum or willing to compromise by including a non-MEXTbased curriculum made a big difference. In sum, while the MEXT did not respond to the changing student body by implementing any concrete measures, local practices changed to cater to the new students’ needs by creating new programs in and out of hoshūkō. This gap produced struggles in some contexts, e.g., JJLS, where there arose the issue of distinction between MEXT-supported education (only for “Japanese” students in practice, despite added discourses in policies) and locally based education (for the keishōgo learner), constructing different subjectivities in the process. In the following sections, we examine the way JJLS negotiated to balance the Japanese government policies and the needs of the local community, and evolved to become a school that included both hoshūkō education and a locally rooted community school.

4.4 The road JJLS took As Table 4.1 shows, JJLS established a relationship with the MEXT soon after being founded. In this section, we describe the MEXT-sent principals’ and local administrators’ struggles to balance the MEXT’s requirements with local needs, based on Lee’s interviews with former school administrators and one of the MEXT-sent principals as well as the recollections of Lee, a local administrator of JJLS between 2004 and 2012. All interviews introduced in what follows were conducted in Japanese and translated into English here by Lee. 4.4.1 Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda: Founding members and local administrators Lee interviewed the former administrators Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda, who were also one of the founding families, at their home on January 12, 2011. Mr. Ikeda had come to California with his family when he was in eighth grade. He went to college and graduate school in the United States and is now a researcher at a local research institute. He was the president of JJLS between 1980 and 2004.

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1980

JJSL opened with 47 students, of whom 8 enrolled in the JFL program. It became a state-approved nonprofit educational organization and was also approved as hoshūkō by Japanese government.

1987

JJSL requested a teacher be deployed by MEXT.

1989

JJSL received the 1st principal deployed by MEXT.

1992

JJSL received the 2nd principal deployed by MEXT.

1995

JJSL received the 3rd principal deployed by MEXT. It started offering a separate curriculum for US college-bound high school students.

1998

JJSL received the 4th principal deployed by MEXT.

2000

JJSL received the 5th principal deployed by MEXT.

2002

JJSL offered optional language classes for eijū students in lower grades.

2003

JJSL offered optional classes for middle-school eijū students.

2004

JJSL received the 6th principal deployed by MEXT. It created a new education unit for programs with non-MEXT-based curricula, headed by a local administrator. It started offering an independent JHL class to eijū students.

2006

JJSL received the 7th principal deployed by MEXT.

2009

JJSL received the 8th principal deployed by MEXT.

2012

JJSL received the 9th principal deployed by MEXT.

Table 4.1: Relationship between JJLS and the MEXT

Mrs. Ikeda came to the United States to marry Mr. Ikeda in 1975. They had been classmates in Japan. She was a secretary at JJLS between 1982 and 2004. During the preparation period in 1979, the founding members arrived at three goals: first, the school should become a state-certified nonprofit organization in the United States; second, it should become a MEXT-approved hoshūkō; and third, it should have a reasonable position on meeting students’ needs. Mr. Ikeda recalled: “One of the founding members strongly felt that JJLS should become a MEXT-approved hoshūkō, while another one wanted to build a school for the local community. That was the reason why we had a JFL program from the beginning”. The first two goals were reached soon. The school attained the status of nonprofit organization in June 1980 and started receiving Japanese government grants to fund teachers’ salaries after becoming a MEXT-approved hoshūkō in 1981. The demography changed as more chūzai families arrived. Mrs. Ikeda said, “In the early 1980s, we did not have many Japanese families who were

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sent by [Japanese] companies in the area. Japanese families here were mostly visiting researchers at local universities and they returned to Japan in two to three years.” She continued: “During the 1980s, the number of families sent by Japanese companies increased, and we received the first principal from Japan in 1989.” There were benefits to becoming a MEXT-approved hoshūkō, Mrs. Ikeda affirmed: “Before we became an approved school, we had to go and get textbooks somewhere else. But once approved, textbooks were sent to our school free of charge [by the MEXT]. Also it would give parents peace of mind if the school was MEXT-approved.” She added that it would not have been possible to receive the government grant toward rent for the school building if the school had not been MEXT-approved. When asked if they were thinking of receiving a MEXT-sent teacher from the beginning, Mr. Ikeda said, “It was not in our original plan, but if we have a program based on the MEXT-based curriculum, we should follow the MEXT policies as much as possible, just like in Japan.” Mrs. Ikeda added to her husband’s answer by saying, “it is very difficult to build a curriculum from scratch. If there is already a curriculum with textbooks, why not use it.” When asked whether they thought that the MEXT-based curriculum was not appropriate for all the students at JJLS, Mrs. Ikeda replied, “By the late 1980s, we had already noticed that, especially in the high school program. There were students whose Japanese abilities were not adequate to study with the MEXT certified textbooks.” Local administrators sought to solve the problem of the gap between the MEXT’s curriculum and the local situation by offering classes specifically designed to cater to local students at the high school level. However, not everyone welcomed these efforts. Mrs. Ikeda explained: “Before we started a high school program for US college-bound students in 1995 [see Table 4.1], we made a lot of effort to accommodate high school students who could not follow the MEXT curriculum. When we ran a special composition class for eijū students, there was a lot of opposition from their parents. They felt their children had been put in a special-needs class.” The students, however, were very happy, Mrs. Ikeda recalled. This was in keeping with the original founders’ third goal to meet students’ needs with suitable objectives. She also said that in the information session conducted at the time, the new principal the MEXT had sent to JJLS had a hard time explaining the high school program for US college-bound students because this new program did not follow the MEXT curriculum. Nonetheless, it was easier to create a program for eijū and chōki-taizai high school students because high school was not part of compulsory education in Japan and thus fell outside the scope of hoshūkō education.

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As mentioned earlier, the number of international marriages increased in the late 1990s. This corresponded to the time when JJLS started facing the need to accommodate eijū and chōki-taizai students in the lower grades. When the school formed a committee to explore the possibility of building a program for eijū and chōki-taizai children in the lower grades in 2001, Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda recalled, the MEXT-sent principal at the time could not comprehend the idea of such language education. It was very difficult for the school to work with him. He filed a complaint with the MEXT, which responded by ordering JJLS not to involve the MEXT-sent principal in any part of school operation except the compulsory education part (grades 1–9 following the MEXT Course of Study). This shows the MEXT’s firm position that MEXT-sent teachers were responsible only for the elementary and middle-school education within the MEXT-prescribed curriculum. This struggle to balance the MEXT’s position and local needs demonstrates that whereas the MEXT’s policy statements came to show willingness to adjust to local needs, it did not actually intend to put them into practice. Even though the Research Study Group on Education of Japanese Children Overseas recommended in 1992 that hoshūkō should accommodate parents’ wishes in a changing world and contribute to local communities, the basic education policies regarding Japanese children overseas did not go beyond the MEXT-prescribed education for Japanese nationals. Other issues also made balancing the status of a MEXT-approved school led by a MEXT-sent principal with the needs of local students difficult, according to Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda. First was the system of sending MEXT-sent principals for only a short period of time, usually two to three years. This short tenure meant these principals were not expected to have a long-term plan. When asked whether they felt the MEXT-sent principals had received enough orientation before they arrived, Mr. Ikeda said, “I feel that often these teachers come to hoshūkō to use their experiences as a stepping stone in their career after they go back to Japan. Therefore, it is often the case that there is no continuity from one principal to the next.” A second issue was the division of labor. Mrs. Ikeda explained: “The school is told by the MEXT that it cannot involve a MEXT-sent teacher in the business operations of the school. He should only be involved in educational matters in 1st through 9th grades. However, if we treated him as the MEXT ordered and did not consult him on other school business matters, we ended up insulting him.” This issue was resolved by dividing the school into two sections. However, the transition was not easy, as Lee recalls in the next section of this chapter. Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda’s recollections of the early days of JJLS, based on their involvement from its foundation in 1980 to 2004, show the shift in the school’s

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target students from “Japanese” students to students with diverse Japanese backgrounds, especially eijū students, who at the time were not yet named as a group, except as students having “different needs”. JJLS’s local administrators’ attempts to better serve them met with resistance from the MEXT, which did not acknowledge students who were unwilling or unable to follow the MEXT Course of Study as “Japanese”. This began to change with the restructuring of JJLS, as Lee describes next.

4.4.2 Lee: Principal of the second unit, 2004–2012 Following the conflict between the MEXT’s stance and the local approach toward the needs of a diverse school body, the local administrators decided to reorganize the programs so that a MEXT-sent principal could concentrate on educational matters in the hoshūkō alone. The JJLS thus established two educational units, as mentioned: one program with the MEXT-based curriculum, and the other with an independent curriculum. This arrangement enabled the MEXTsent principal to oversee only the hoshūkō part of the school. In April 2004, the hoshūkō part of the school was renamed the hoshūkō-bu of the first educational unit, headed by a MEXT-sent principal, and the rest of the programs in the school became the second educational unit (daini-bu), headed by a local administrator, Lee. Lee believes that once the JJLS’s response to the MEXT’s request and the efforts of the new administrative team took effect, the school came to function as one community, overcoming the tension between the MEXT-sent principal and the local administrators that had plagued the school in 2002– 2003 owing to disagreement on whether the MEXT-appointed principal was responsible for all students at JJLS. With this arrangement, an independent keishōgo program was offered within JJLS as of 2004. Because of the budget limitations at the time, that first year the school offered only one multi-aged pilot class for students who did not plan to return to Japan, or eiju students. Then, as more students started enrolling in this class, it became financially viable to develop the full-fledged keishōgo program called the Jackson Course.13 Lee thought the philosophy of JJLS – acknowledging its roots as a community-based school founded by local parents, not by a local Japanese Chamber of Commerce – was conducive to the establishment of the independent keishōgo program within the school. In the first year of the Jackson Course, Lee encountered three factors that made some eijū parents reluctant to transfer their children to the Jackson 13 “Jackson Course” was not the name of program in the beginning, as Chapter 3 describes.

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Course. The first was parents’ perceptions about themselves and their children. Most of the “Japanese” parents at JJLS felt keishōgo education was for “JapaneseAmericans”, not for their “Japanese” children. Most of these parents had been born and raised in Japan and now were living in the United States. Having received kokugo education themselves, many parents held that kokugo was legitimate education for “Japanese” and wanted their children to learn kokugo at JJLS. One mother commented to Lee that she did not (want to) believe her children’s Japanese was “keishōgo”. Another mother told her that were it not for the kokugo education in hoshūkō, it would not be worth it to send her sons to JJLS. Therefore, the Jackson Course was established in a definite atmosphere of kokugo education in hoshūkō being seen as the one and only legitimate way of imparting “Japanese” education to children. This implies these parents’ construction that what the Jackson Course offered, keishōgo education, was less than “Japanese”. The second factor was the perception of the Jackson Course. Because the teacher and three of the seven students attending the Jackson Course in its first year had been recruited from the JFL program, parents felt it was more like another JFL class. In fact, however, these three children were eijū students who, though they had some knowledge of Japanese language, were placed in the JFL class because they had not had kokugo education prior to attending JJLS. Their level of BICS led Lee and her predecessor to judge that they would derive greater benefit from the Jackson Course curriculum than from the JFL program. Moreover, the other four students, who transferred from hoshūkō to the Jackson Course, were considered too far behind linguistically to keep up with the curriculum in hoshūkō. As a result, the new class in the Jackson Course was perceived as a class for dropouts. Some parents commented to Lee: “My children will grow up here but I hesitate to switch them to the Jackson Course because it is labeled as a class for dropouts.” This again points to the construction of keishōgo learners as students who were not as good as the “Japanese” students. The third factor was a configuration problem. Jackson Course only offered one class when it started. Thus, the parents who were interested in the Jackson Course were uncertain about where their children would be in a couple of years because they saw only one multi-age class, in contrast to the established hoshūkō program offering 1st to 9th grade. Some parents decided to take a “wait and see” attitude. Thereafter, Lee held an annual information session to explain the Jackson Course: it was designed for children who did not plan to go through the Japanese education system in Japan, and therefore it did not follow the kokugo curriculum; it used MEXT-approved textbooks as resources for further language activities; the class was conducted solely in Japanese.

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Enrollment in the Jackson Course increased from 7 in the first year to 19 in the second year (2007–2008). The number steadily increased, and by the beginning of its ninth year (2012–2013), the Jackson Course consisted of five classes with a total of 47 students.14 Lee believed more parents had started understanding the suitability of the Jackson Course for their children. With this shift, Lee felt the perception of the keishōgo learner had changed from something less than “Japanese” students to bilingual (English and Japanese) and bicultural (American and Japanese) students whose lives were based in the United States. Some parents appreciated the fact that the Jackson course curriculum allowed students to use knowledge gained in their regular American schools. In sum, as the Jackson Course developed and more and more parents and students came to see its legitimacy, the notion of the keishōgo learner came to be constructed in relation to the “Japanese” tied to kokugo education in hoshūkō-bu. We analyze this process in greater depth in Chapter 6 by drawing on students’ and parents’ experiences and perceptions. The construction of these two types of students via the institutional development of two programs here was a result of Japanese government policies that paid lip service to the importance of considering students’ local life but meanwhile insisted on delivering only the same MEXT-developed Course of Study used for students in Japan. This created a situation where “Japanese” students were constructed based on students in hoshūkō-bu as opposed to the keishōgo learner, even though hoshūkō-bu included diverse students, from chūzai to eijū.

4.4.3 MEXT-sent principals MEXT-sent principals are MEXT representatives charged with ensuring that hoshūkō run according to the purposes and goals described by the MEXT. They are responsible only for 1st through 9th grade education that follows the MEXT-based curriculum.15 However, when a hoshūkō offers programs for students before and after these compulsory education years – preschoolers, kindergarteners, and high school students – the MEXT-sent principal, as the head of the hoshūkō, usually administers them as well. This was the case at JJLS – including also the JFL program – until 2004. 14 As of April 2012, the Jackson Course accepted first graders in a separate class especially for first grade students, rather than a multi-aged class. Chapter 8 discusses this further. 15 Job descriptions of teachers deployed to schools outside of Japan 3-(1), Department of International Education, MEXT (zaigai kyōikushisetsu haken-kyōin-no shokumu 3-(1) Kokusai kyōiku-ka).

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The MEXT-sent principals are public school teachers who, having applied to positions in schools overseas, are selected by a local school board of their public school district under the MEXT in Japan. They act as a liaison to a Japanese consulate in the region where they are deployed, oversee how the curriculum is carried out, train locally hired teachers, and advise chūzai families about their children’s educational concerns. As representatives of the MEXT, MEXT-sent principals sometimes find it difficult to implement the MEXT’s agenda when working with local administrators who have a different agenda, especially when the division of labor is not clear. That was the case for the fifth MEXT-sent principal at JJLS, who served from April 2000 to March 2004. As Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda and Lee mentioned, before JJLS established its second education unit in 2004, any development of programs to institutionally cater to eijū students outside the MEXT-based curriculum created ambiguity about the MEXT-sent principal’s duties regarding these programs, leading to tension between the MEXT-sent principal and local administrators. JJLS’s fifth principal firmly believed that his duty was to attend to chūzai and chōki-taizai students, whom he understood as the “Japanese” students and thus the responsibility of the MEXT, Lee recalls. As principal of the entire JJLS, he did not welcome responsibility for programs that did not follow the MEXTbased curriculum and insisted they did not suit the goal and purpose of hoshūkō. The sixth MEXT-sent principal, who served the JJLS from April 2004 to March 2006, worked in the newly restructured JJLS, where his duty was limited to hoshūkō-bu while Lee oversaw the second education unit. Prior to his arrival, he had been the principal of an elementary school in Japan, and his stint at JJLS was the first time he had left Japan. There was no open tension or struggle during his term. However, Lee heard later indirectly that he had found the school’s administrative support inadequate and filed a complaint with the MEXT. This shows that the MEXT-sent principal may feel pressures and difficulties despite the apparent smoothness of operation at school. Unlike the previous MEXT-sent teachers at JJSL, the seventh MEXT-sent principal, who served from April 2006 to March 2009, had never held a position as principal or assistant principal in a school in Japan. In an interview with Lee in the school business office on December 30, 2008, he told her he had originally applied for a teaching position in a hoshūko but wound up being assigned the post of principal at JJLS. He was supportive of JJLS’s aspiration to cater to diverse students and was involved in all aspects of school operation. However, he told Lee that he had been told in official MEXT meetings and conferences not to pay too much attention to matters beyond hoshūkō-bu.

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The eighth MEXT-sent principal, who served from April 2009 to March 2012, was a retired principal. (The MEXT started sending retired teachers to hoshūkō in 2008 as a cost-saving measure.) Having held the position of principal in middle schools in Japan as well as a full-time Japanese school in the United States in the early 2000s, he was well-informed and knowledgeable about the situations in both full-time and weekend Japanese language schools in the United States. And by his arrival in 2009, JJLS’s system of two education units was well established and recognized among other hoshūkō in the region. At a meeting for regional hoshūkō in summer 2010, at which Lee was present, he stated that JJLS was a model of hoshūkō of the future, in that it offered programs based on three different curricula, i.e., the MEXT-based curriculum, keishōgo curriculum, and JFL curriculum. This transition in the stances of the MEXT-sent principals points not only to individual differences among principals and the settling in of the keishōgo program, but also to the MEXT’s continuing position, despite its current official policy of attending to its students’ local lives, of focusing on what it considered “Japanese” students, who attended hoshūkō and adhered to the curriculum based on the MEXT Course of Study. Thus the MEXT provided a model against which the keishōgo learner was constructed in the minds of local administrators as they designed and implemented keishōgo programs that differed from kokugo, described in detail in Chapter 5.

4.5 Construction of “Japanese” students and “heritage language learners of Japanese” As described in section 4.2, prior to the 1960s the Japanese government did not have a clear policy for full-time and weekend Japanese schools abroad. By establishing the system of sending teachers to those schools, the government was able to regulate curriculum to follow the MEXT Course of Study and organize support for these schools. For JJLS, as a MEXT-approved hoshūkō rooted in the local community, fulfilling the desire to offer all its students flexible, suitable education has not always been easy. The school was founded in 1980, six years after the Japanese government deployed its first teachers to hoshūkō amidst a rush to institute such schools. Therefore, it was easy to turn to the MEXT for curriculum, textbooks, and accreditation from the start. JJLS differed from other hoshūkō in that from its outset it offered a JFL program to local children and Japanese children from eijū families in keeping with its founding philosophy that the school should be responsive to the needs of the local community. This philosophy played a pivotal

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role later. As the Japanese economy became stronger, Japanese companies increasingly sent employees to the United States with their families; hence JJLS’s chūzai population rose, too. However, as Mr. Ikeda indicated, the school was aware of the limitations use of the MEXT-base curriculum posed for eijū students as early as the late 1980s. As mentioned in section 4.2, in 1987 the Ad Hoc Education Committee delivered a statement on the importance of internationalization in education, which implies that the Japanese government was aware of the difficulty of enforcing the MEXT-prescribed curriculum in hoshūkō. However, as shown above, the government’s policy was always based on “building good Japanese nationals” and despite mention of the value of local experience there was no concrete attempt to resolve the discrepancy the policy presented for eijū students and others. Faced with the immediate need to meet JJLS’s third founding objective of catering to all students with reasonable goals, JJLS created a keishōgo program with an independent curriculum. This resulted in tension between the MEXT-sent principal and local administrators, as described by local administrators (Mr. and Mrs. Ikeda and Lee). The tension was ameliorated gradually by creating the second education unit for programs with curricula not strictly based on the MEXT Course of Study. The experiences of the MEXT-sent principals show the effects of institutional arrangement – presence of a separate program with non-MEXT-based curricula and of the MEXT-sent principal’s official responsibility for such programs – as well as personal differences among the principals in terms of their philosophy of what hoshūkō should look like and how the diverse student body should be dealt with, as well as the philosophy of the school as a whole. The fifth MEXTsent principal’s tenure, the most difficult case to date, took place in a period when the Japanese population in the United States was changing. The sixth MEXT-sent principal needed more administrative support at the time of institutional transition. The case of the seventh MEXT-sent principal shows the success of an appropriate institutional structure and a match between the principal’s philosophy and that of JJLS. His experience also shows that despite the MEXT’s new policy of sensitivity to local needs, the MEXT did not encourage the policy in practice. MEXT-sent principals thus were put in a difficult position, especially if they wished to work with local administrators and be involved in the activities of the entire JJLS. The eighth MEXT-sent principal was a case of a good match between the school’s institutional maturity and his own experience and vision. In short, although the policies of the government changed to emphasize a need to adjust to local situations in which the contours of student body were changing, no concrete measures were taken to implement changes or support locally initiated changes. This led to struggles between the MEXT-sent principals

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and local administrators. In this process, “Japanese” and “heritage language learner of Japanese” (keishōgo learner) were constructed as opposites, as those in hoshūkō-bu following the MEXT Course of Study (the “Japanese” students; kokugo learners) and those who attended the Jackson Course, learning outside the MEXT Course of Study (“heritage language learner of Japanese”; keishōgo learners). In their efforts to cater to all types of students, local administrators created programs independent of MEXT policies. In sum, the policies of the homeland government played a significant role in constructing who was a “heritage language learner of Japanese” (keishōgo learner). Unlike most research on heritage language education, which focuses on the host society’s effects on minority heritage language education, this chapter pointed out the importance of also scrutinizing the homeland government’s policies, especially in cases where the homeland government is deeply involved. This chapter also suggests the complexity of what at first appeared to be a mere minority language school. JJLS had two education units: hoshūkō-bu (the first unit) and the second unit. However, programs within each section were more complex. Hoshūkō-bu and some programs in the second unit – preschool, kindergarten, and high school – prescribed a Japanese monolingual classroom; the use of English was strongly discouraged. The Jackson Course was closer to bilingual community education (García et al. 2013) yet bilingualism was merely permitted, not encouraged. Meanwhile, students’ ability in English was not seen as a hindrance to learning Japanese but as a resource to deepen understanding of Japanese concepts and language. What made the situation more complex was how these programs were lived, which we discuss in the following chapters.

5 Designing the heritage language learner: Modes of governmentality in the classroom 5.1 Intended modes of governmentality in hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course The keishōgo learner was imagined and constructed in contrast to hoshūkō-bu students by MEXT officials and local administrators, as discussed in Chapter 4. In this chapter, we discuss concrete implementation of this imagining by examining the design and implementation of the school programs in hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course, using the notion of governmentality. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Michel Foucault (1977) argues that practices at school are governed by the modes of governmentality of discipline, which “compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, and excludes [students]. In short, it normalizes [them]” (Foucault 1977: 183). The exam combines this normalizing judgment with the techniques of an observing hierarchy (Foucault 1977). Researchers apply this analytical framework to current education in general (Gore 1998; Green 1998). In this chapter, we focus on how administrators at JJLS differentiated the mode of governmentality based on their vision of specific programs and imagined target students, aiming to mold students’ behavior and subjectivities differently. Hoshūkō-bu was based on the mode of governmentality of kokugo education; the Jackson Course, keishōgo education. While Chapter 6 will examine how students experienced and interpreted a mode of governmentality that may have differed from what administrators intended, in this chapter we describe the governmentality intended by the administrators, following Mitchell Dean’s (1999) four dimensions of governmentality: (1) the fields of visibility, or ways to visualize who and what are to be governed and how; (2) techniques, or mechanisms, procedures, instruments, tactics, technologies, and vocabularies through which individuals are governed; (3) knowledge that arises from and informs the activity of governing; and (4) subjectivities, or ways regimes of government affect the formation of subjectivities. It is important to note here, however, that the degree of deployment of modes of governmentality within each program depended on grade level and teachers.

5.2 Visibility and technique Both hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course visualized students – the governed – by putting them in a classroom in which their oral interactions and written

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documents became objects of observation on the assumption that they informed the teacher about the students’ linguistic proficiency. The treatment of that visualized proficiency constituted the various techniques by which students were governed. The first technique was ondoku 音読, or reading aloud from a textbook. Students were to read given passages with correct intonation and some emotion. A student who made mistakes in reading was corrected in front of the class. Reading the textbook out loud visualized several things. It visualized students’ work habits and commitment because practicing by reading aloud repeatedly was believed to increase ondoku proficiency. In both programs, students’ homework included reading assigned sections of the textbook aloud every day. It was usually these assigned sections that students were asked to read in the classroom, and how well they read aloud was held to indicate how well they had practiced at home. Reading the textbook aloud also visualized students’ reading proficiency in general, if they were reading the section for the first time, and their command of the grade-designated kanji. Because the textbook used only kanji that students had learned or were currently learning, inability to read them correctly revealed that the student was behind in grade-level knowledge of kanji. This mattered to students, as shown in the following comments by Sasha – who moved from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course when she was in third grade (see Chapter 6 for details about Sasha) – in response to the question of what she remembered about hoshūkō-bu: Sasha: Sometimes I didn’t understand what teachers were saying when they called on me and I am like one of the people who didn’t know a lot of the kanji. When Doerr observed the Jackson Course classes on April 15, 2007, Sasha’s ability in reading kanji as well as knowledge of words was marked while she read aloud an old poem: [. . .] Even in the darkness, when a lot of fireflies, fireflies fly criss, cross (tobi-chigai-taru). Teacher: Crisscross (tobi-chigaitaru). It’s one word. Sasha: Crisscross. Teacher: Right. Sasha: Hmmm . . . [cannot read kanji in the next line] Teacher: Also (mata). Sasha: Also (mata). Sasha:

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Such visualization and public correction were done in a similar manner in both hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course. The only difference was that in hoshūkō-bu, students (usually chūzai students) tended to correct others’ (usually eijū students’) reading of kanji. These acts of correction performatively created hierarchical relations among students. In the Jackson Course, by contrast, it was always the teacher who corrected mistakes. The second technique of governmentality consisted of asking students questions on reading comprehension and sanctioning the answers in front of the class. Teachers usually posed a question to the entire class and called on one student to answer it. A slight difference between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course involved the source of the questions: they came from the teacher in hoshūkō-bu, but in the Jackson Course it was the students who generated them (i.e., the teacher asked students what they wanted the teacher to explain). The answering part was the same in both classes: when a student answered incorrectly, the teacher tended either to ask more questions to help the student reach the correct answer or ask other students until someone answered correctly. This practice visualized students’ ability at several levels. Those who raised hands to answer were displaying themselves as “knowing the answer”, even though the answer might turn out to be incorrect. When the teacher called on a student, whether or not that particular student knew the answer became visible. Knowing the answer here indicated that the student understood the material – i.e., it demonstrated comprehension skills. The teacher often asked about the plot, what a character in the textbook was feeling, or the meaning of a metaphor. Some questions could have multiple answers, but the teacher’s answer prevailed as the correct answer. Whether answers were single or multiple, this technique displayed the authority of the teacher: the teacher was someone with the correct answer. Below is an example from the 8th grade hoshūkō-bu class on March 8, 2009, when a teacher was asking students comprehension questions from a workbook about an essay in the textbook. Teacher: [. . .] He [the author] is saying that it seems this is the same thing as what happens in the world of words. What does that mean? I wonder what it means. Ms. Kato [Kumiko]? Kumiko: Ummm . . . Well . . . Teacher: Yes? Kumiko: Well . . . um . . . petals are . . . Should I just say the answer to the question [that I wrote in the workbook]? Teacher: Sure, you can say that. Kumiko: Petals are like each word, like, they are just small parts of the language, and, well, the tree as a whole is the language and the petals are small, like each word in the language.

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Teacher: Yes, yes, yes. That’s right. Yes, that’s right. Petals are . . . that’s right. He is saying that. When it came to English, however, students could know more than the teacher, reversing the authority (see Doerr 2009c for a similar case). This was acknowledged more in the Jackson Course than in hoshūkō-bu, as is shown below in an episode from a Jackson Course class on April 15, 2007, when the teacher was explaining about tree sap (italicized text indicates utterances in English). Teacher: Sap [jushi]. This word might be a bit difficult for you guys. Right? Yes. Oil of a tree . . . Mmm . . . how should I put it. Oil that oozes out from a tree. It looks like this [draws a picture on the blackboard]. Student: [whispers] Sap? Teacher: Have you seen it? Uh? How do you say it in English? Student: Sap? Teacher: Sap? [does not seem to recognize the word] Swirl? Student: Tree sap. Teacher: Sap? [still does not seem to recognize the word] Well, um . . . there are various kinds of sap. The third technique involved comments teachers made in front of the class to enforce rules of classroom behavior. For example, JJLS teachers tended to tell students to stop talking while another person was talking, or to sit up straight in their chairs with their feet on the floor when they were slouching. What kind of behavior was reprimanded, and how often, depended on the teachers. However, the tendency was to be stricter in lower grades and in hoshūkō-bu than in higher grades and the Jackson Course: sitting cross-legged on a chair, for instance, might be reprimanded as bad manners in a 6th grade hoshūkō-bu class, but not in the Jackson Course at the same level or in a higher grade. In higher grades, reprimands took a different tone, as in the comment below, which a hoshūkō-bu teacher made about a student who was eating a sandwich during class on January 17, 2010: Teacher: [to the entire class] Look, there is someone who’s begun eating already, although the bell hasn’t rung yet. There is a person who is doing hayaben [early lunch]. I am surprised to see that a girl would do that. A student (not the one eating): Oh my gosh [ jokingly]! So improper!

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In a fourth technique, teachers wrote comments and corrections on students’ work. Unlike the above techniques, which visualized students’ proficiency and behavior to the entire class, written work visualized them only to the teacher, the student in question, and his/her parents, except on occasions when work was displayed on a wall. Weekly homework in which mistakes were marked, weekly kanji quizzes, and the report cards that were sent home twice a year held examples of use of this technique. These practices were common to hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course, but in terms of visualizing students’ proficiency and governing students’ actions, the two programs differed in five respects: (1) class formation, (2) kanji that were covered, (3) coverage of topics not included in the textbooks, such as current affairs, (4) grading, and (5) subject-centered or holistic approaches. We discuss each below. Class formation in hoshūkō-bu was based on age. As in compulsory education in Japan, students’ advancement to the next grade was automatic, regardless of the degree of academic attainment in each grade. Here, students’ academic standing did not affect students’ membership in a particular class. In contrast, classes in the Jackson Course were multi-aged and formed with consideration of both age and proficiency. Assessment determined whether students moved from the elementary school level to the middle school level of the Jackson Course, as mentioned in Chapter 3. Going by the yardstick of the MEXT Course of Study, there was some delay in the materials covered in the Jackson Course: e.g., in order to move to the middle school level (for 7th to 9th graders), a student was required to have attained the knowledge the MEXT Course of Study expected from 5th and 6th graders. In short, in the Jackson Course, the class the student belonged in visualized his or her academic standing. Regarding kanji, in hoshūkō-bu, the MEXT Course of Study determined which kanji were learned in each grade. For example, out of 1,008 kanji to be learned in elementary school (1st to 6th grade), 6th graders learned 181 kanji. Knowing the assigned kanji within the grade was often seen as a sign of a student’s keeping up with the grade. The Jackson Course, by contrast, grouped kanji with similar shapes and meanings for learning regardless of the MEXTassigned grades, as mentioned earlier, and its goal was to cover 678 kanji, including the 410 kanji that the AP examination in Japanese requires, by the time students reached the middle school level. Students learned kanji in groups based on individual proficiencies, an approach that differed from the multi-age levels for other subjects, as explained in Chapter 3. In short, in hoshūkō-bu, knowledge of kanji showed whether a student was keeping up with the grade; those who did not keep up were left alone. In the Jackson Course, the class a student belonged in visualized his/her knowledge of kanji, as students had to master the assigned level of kanji before moving to the next level.

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As for current affairs, which were not part of the hoshūkō-bu curriculum, each Jackson Course student regularly chose one current event, presented it in front of the class, and answered questions from fellow students and the teacher. The incorporation of current affairs in the program reflected the Jackson Course’s aim to teach academic Japanese from various angles that were relevant to eijū students living in the United States. The teacher did not assess or correct the presentations. In terms of grading, hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course differed because the former’s approach to grades was quantitative and the latter’s, qualitative. Hoshūkō-bu gave letter grades of A, B, and C in report cards. The grades were not curved, and teachers were quite lenient. For example, a grade of C was rare because the teachers were aware that it was difficult to digest a week’s worth of the MEXT-guided curriculum in one afternoon; as for homework, they acknowledged that the regular local schools also assigned homework in English during the week. The Jackson Course report card did not have letter grades; instead it provided a narrative description of students’ accomplishments in comparison to their past performance. This departed from “normalization” in relation to others in class. Compared to hoshūkō-bu, then, the Jackson Course’s technologies of government were less oriented to achieving a predetermined “standard” in a set amount of time and more concerned with setting goals to be met at one’s own pace. One reason for this difference was that the Jackson Course aimed to cultivate Japanese language skills from various angles that were relevant to students living in the United States. Its curriculum thus included things the MEXT yardstick could not measure, such as knowledge and critical understanding of current affairs, which points to an image of keishōgo learners as English-Japanese bilinguals with diverse academic interests. Grading thus established what to aim for and how, molding students’ behavior. Regarding approaches to subjects, while hoshūkō-bu focused on the subject at hand, the Jackson Course took a holistic approach. To illustrate this, we compare hoshūkō-bu and Jackson Course classroom practices below.

5.2.1 Learning about Takamura Kōtarō in hoshūkō-bu: The subject-centered approach On March 2, 2008, in the third period of 7th grade hoshūkō-bu, the class was working with a story about a visit Yutaka Miyaji paid to Kōtarō Takamura, a famous early 20th-century Japanese poet and artist. Students read the story aloud from the textbook, and the teacher asked questions about certain words,

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such as guchoku “very honest, bordering on stupid”. The teacher summarized the story by asking students questions such as “He visited Kōtarō. With whom?” to which a student answered “With his best friend”. The teacher then asked, “What did they bring?” and another student answered, “Ten tomatoes”. Three or four students actively responded to the teacher’s questions. These students were mainly chūzai students and some chōki taizai students. No eijū students answered these questions voluntarily. The teacher called on almost all the students to read sections of the story aloud. Next, the teacher told students that the friend who went along to visit Kōtarō Takamura was a brother of the famous writer Kenji Miyazawa. Then the teacher explained that during the bombing of Tokyo toward the end of World War II, Kōtarō Takamura had fled the city and stayed with Kenji Miyazawa in rural northern Japan. The visit the textbook described took place during the aftermath of the war, when little food was available, the teacher explained, which was why they brought some food when they visited Takamura, now living in this rural area. The teacher explained only about the particular situation involving Takamura and Miyazawa; she did not discuss the bombing of Tokyo or how people fled from Tokyo to rural areas. It was taken for granted that students knew about these historical events, which are usually taught in history class in Japan. The teacher further asked students to describe what Miyazawa’s house was like. Relying on the story, the students described a hut in the mountains where he supported himself by growing vegetables and gathering wild plants. The kind of hut he lived in was not explained, as though it was assumed the students already knew what huts in Japan are like. Having asked the students to read on and further explained how Takamura lived, the teacher then discussed one of Miyazawa’s poems. The poem mentioned eating four gou of brown rice, which was considered a poor diet. This led to a discussion of how much a gou (a unit of grain) was and how much rice the students’ families ate (for details, see Doerr and Lee 2010). Next the teacher moved on to discuss what Takamura’s hands looked like to the visitors. Finally, she distributed handouts with questions about the content of the story, which the students filled in on their own, asking some questions of the teacher, Doerr (who was observing the class), and one another. When the third period ended, the rest of the questions were assigned as homework. In sum, the hoshūkō-bu teacher had students read the story in the textbook aloud several sections at a time and summarized the sections with students. She explained some phrases and expressions in the sections but did not typically explain the historical or cultural background of the story. While these classroom practices reflect an assumption about the students – that they were knowledgeable about Japanese history and lifestyles – they also produced students with

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little knowledge of these matters because JJLS does not offer in-depth instruction in history. This contrasts with the Jackson Course’s approach, introduced below.

5.2.2 Learning about John Manjirō and beyond in the Jackson Course: The holistic approach On February 1, 2009, the third-period Level 4 Jackson Course class began with a discussion of sakoku “isolationism”, the historical context in which John Manjiro operated. The teacher first discussed the meaning of the kanji used for the word sakoku – sa “chain” and koku “country” – without explaining what sakoku meant. She asked students what it meant to shackle a country with a chain. One student, probably knowing the name already, said it was isolationism, which had left Japan trading with only the Netherlands and China from the seventeenth to nineteenth century. The teacher elaborated on what isolationism was and who had initiated its end. When the teacher mentioned the name John Manjirō, she asked the class, “Why the name John?” Students asked if he was an American. After some discussion about his name and what it suggested, the teacher read a section about John Manjirō aloud from the textbook. Then she asked the students about certain words, such as hyōryū-suru “to drift”. When the teacher explained how an American whaling ship had found Manjirō, she also explained which kanji indicated the word whale and that the United States was a whaling country back then. Mayumi asked why Manjirō – fourteen years of age at the time – was working on a fishing boat. The class discussed the ages of working people then and now, wondering whether or not students would fish on a boat for a living at their age. A student read the next section aloud, and the teacher asked the class why Manjirō, who was saved by the captain of the American whaling ship, had to go to the United States instead of Japan. After some guesses by students, the teacher explained that during the isolationist period, Japanese people were not allowed to leave the country; if they did leave, they faced punishment upon their return to Japan. The teacher then wrote difficult words and their English translations on the blackboard and explained them. The class talked about the fact that it had taken Manjirō five years to get back to Japan: he was fourteen when he left Japan and nineteen when he returned. As the students were roughly around these ages themselves, they discussed what it would feel like to leave one’s country for so long.

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The teacher asked several students, one at a time, to read several sections aloud and explained various words that appeared. In the next section, the class found that when Manjirō finally returned to Japan, he was not punished for leaving the country because the Japanese government needed the help of someone knowledgeable about the United States to respond to Commodore Matthew Perry. Perry, an American who had come to Japan, was demanding Japan end its isolationism and promised to come back to Japan in a year to negotiate his proposal. The class then discussed various issues – why Manjirō did not work as a translator (some Japanese government officials did not trust him, the teacher said), and how some Japanese had learned English without leaving Japan. The teacher read more sections, explained difficult words, summarized the story, and asked students what they thought about Manjirō. Students said he was “amazing”, “courageous”, and “smart and lucky”. Here, students did not compare their own inclusion in two cultures with Manjiro’s experience in two cultures. Rather, their focus was Manjiro’s adventure – leaving his country illegally, traveling on a ship for a long time, living in foreign land, and taking a long time to return home, risking punishment upon succeeding. At one point, the teacher suggested the difficulty of being associated with two different cultures when she mentioned how the Japanese government had utilized Manjiro’s knowledge but not used him as a translator because some people in the government did not trust him and thought he would translate in a way that was advantageous to the United States. This pointed to the ideology of lack of loyalty that the state holds toward multilingual and multicultural individuals (Irvine and Gal 2000). As the teacher explained the situation, she said, “it’s a shame (zannen jan)” about Manjiro’s bilingual ability not being utilized. A student responded, “they shouldn’t care [about Manjiro’s American association] (betsu ni iijan)”, to which the teacher replied, “What a waste of talent!” Then another student asked an unrelated question about learning English, and class discussion moved in a different direction. The teacher ended the period by going over the difficult words and assigning homework. In sum, the Jackson Course class covered the historical background in depth and related the protagonist’s experiences in various areas to the students’. This approach was based on an image of students as not knowledgeable about the various aspects of life and history in Japan. It differed from a deficit-based approach in that the program recognized and valued students’ knowledge of American history and lifestyles, as evidenced by the teacher often asking students about the United States and by the curriculum, which involved comparison of Japan and the United States. The acknowledgement of the students’ lack of knowledge about Japan was treated constructively as a chance to provide

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this knowledge to the students. In fact, the stated objectives of the Jackson Course were to connect the knowledge attained in American schools to Japanese language study and help students acquire usable Japanese language through a variety of materials and topics (Jackson Course brochure, Spring 2012). These goals informed every aspect of the curriculum. The different techniques used in hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course reveal the school administrators’ vision of the student body of each program and the different ways they wished to mold the students’ knowledge and behavior. Topics a teacher offered reveal that teacher’s expectations – what students should already know and what they need to learn – thus molding students’ ways of thinking and expanding their areas of interest.

5.3 Knowledge School administrators obtained knowledge about students’ “linguistic proficiency” through visualizing technology and from their family background, obtained in registration forms at the beginning of every school year. This knowledge, which informed the administrators about the students, influenced hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course differently. In hoshūkō-bu, teachers could use their knowledge of students’ family background to better prepare themselves to teach these students. However, whether or how to do this was up to the teacher, as hoshūkō-bu offered no relevant teacher training. One hoshūkō-bu teacher said it was easy to cover the teaching content in hoshūkō-bu because everything that needed to be explained was in the teachers’ manuals, but it was difficult to cater to students with diverse linguistic abilities because the instruction in the textbook was designed for Japanese “native speakers”, regardless of the diverse linguistic backgrounds a given hoshūkō-bu class might have. The MEXT-assigned principal allocated class hours to each module of a MEXT-certified textbook, as mentioned. MEXT had certified several textbooks and accompanying teacher’s manuals that detail the kinds of activities to be done for each module based on the Course of Study. MEXT created its Course of Study in consultation with members of the Central Council for Education in Japan, who were academics, politicians, businesspeople, and journalists. In Japan, each school district or school chose the textbook it wished to use. In the United States, the Japan Overseas Educational Services 1 (a MEXT organization in charge of education of Japanese citizens abroad) chose and distributed a set of textbooks to all hoshūkō. Each hoshūkō principal decided the distribution of time per lesson, considering that hoshūkō only meets once a week. For example, the 1 Kaigai shijo kyōiku zaidan 海外子女教育財団

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2008–2009 6th grade at JJLS covered 175 hours’ worth of kokugo class in Japan in 114 hours. Content was not usually omitted; rather, less time was assigned on each covered item. Knowledge of the general language proficiency of the student body was not used as a guide in this process. The flexibility of the Jackson Course’s curriculum differentiated it from hoshūkō-bu: the Jackson Course was not tied to the MEXT Course of Study but instead imagined keishōgo learners as having diverse proficiency in Japanese, various interests and experiences in the United States, proficiency in English, diverse academic interests, and multiple heritages. It was this acknowledgement of diversity that made the design and operation of the Jackson Course flexible. As Chapters 3 and 8 illustrate, the Jackson Course was continuously evolving. Knowledge about students’ proficiency in Japanese and their personal backgrounds played a large role in administrators’ and teachers’ plans for the class material, especially given the small sizes of the classes (e.g., six students in the Level 4 Jackson Course in 2007–2008). As Chapter 9 relates, students’ and parents’ opinions affected the operations of the Jackson Course. Meanwhile, the quality of the class relied on each teacher’s creativity and pedagogical ability. As Chapter 3 observed, the administrators and teachers involved in the Jackson Course were active practitioner researchers, some with doctoral or master’s degrees in related fields. They conducted research about lesson plans and students’ reactions to them and presented their results at various meetings on keishōgo in particular and heritage language education in general. Administrators’ and teachers’ involvement in research communities contributed to the accumulation of knowledge about heritage language education in practice, on the one hand, and put into practice the theories research communities develop, on the other.

5.4 Subjectivities Hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course imagined and shaped students’ subjectivities differently. Whereas hoshūkō-bu carried forward the student subjectivities imagined in the MEXT Course of Study – Japanese living in Japan – the Jackson Course viewed students as having multiple subject positions, one of which was Japanese. To illustrate this, this section introduces two cases from hoshūkō-bu and one from the Jackson Course, as well as interviews with two teachers. 5.4.1 On supporting Japan’s future The exchange below took place in a 7th grade hoshūkō-bu social studies lesson in February 2008. The class was learning age structures of populations in various countries (emphasis added).

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Teacher: Japanese people have one of the longest life expectancies in the world. A lot of elderly people. Not many children. That’s a problem. Yaichi (chūzai student): Japan’s future is on our shoulders. Teacher: That’s exactly what I wanted to say! I am the one that would be supported. . . [. . .] Teacher: You guys have to both work hard and make babies, otherwise. . . The above conversation indicates that the teacher and Yaichi believed the students in this hoshūkō-bu class were “Japanese” and/or were responsible for Japan’s future – despite the fact that 5 of the 13 students (38%) in the class were eijū students with at least one non-Japanese parent. There were no protests or disapproval from the students. This highlights the hoshūkō-bu’s tie to MEXT, which focused on Japanese in Japan. As discussed in Chapter 4, hoshūkō education assumed students were Japanese citizens who eventually would return to Japan. Therefore the underlying message was that a student in hoshūkō was a Japanese, not a bicultural Japanese-American, person. Yet more than a third of hoshūkō-bu students were eijū with at least one non-Japanese parent. The design of hoshūkō-bu ignored these students’ complex sense of belonging. As we mentioned in Chapter 4, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs viewed Japanese in the United States more in the way the Jackson Course did. In any case, the lesson excerpted above did not mention that these students would support the future of the United States, or contribute to a globalized world.

5.4.2 A hoshūkō-bu teacher’s view On March 9, 2008, when Doerr interviewed the teacher who took part in the exchange related above, she said she had moved to the United States from Japan because of her husband’s intracompany transfer about 25 years earlier. She was in her late fifties at the time of the interview, and although her two children were working and attending college in the United States, she felt that she would “go back” to Japan some day. She made a three-week visit to Japan every two or three years. Both of her children had attended JJLS. She began teaching after her best friend took a teaching post at JJLS. About her “identity”, she said she “cannot help but be Japanese”. She attributed this to having been born and raised in Japan: “I am not well adapted to the US society,” she said,

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laughing. When asked if she had considered teaching in the Jackson Course, she said she would “feel uncomfortable teaching Japanese who are a bit like Americans. I am Japanese and I still live in Japanese society here, so I wouldn’t be able to serve the role properly. I never thought about teaching the Jackson Course. I feel my way of thinking is very strongly Japanese.” To the question whether she considered students’ cultural background when leading discussion in class, she said she did not – in contrast to the Jackson Course teacher we introduce later in this section.

5.4.3 On the voting age The incident below took place in the 9th grade hoshūkō-bu social studies class on June 28, 2009. The class period was devoted to discussing the voting system in Japan. The teacher (not the same as the one in the episode related above), asked whether the students could vote. A student said no, and conversation developed as follows. Teacher: How old do you have to be to vote [in Japan]? Anne (eijū student): Twenty. Teacher: How many more years do you have to wait? Tarō (chūzai student): Six years. [. . .] Teacher: You have to learn a lot about Japan in those six years. [. . .] An eijū student: Here it says you can vote from 20 years of age, but isn’t it 18? Teacher: Oh, this is about Japan. This exchange shows how the hoshūkō-bu curriculum, using the MEXT-certified textbook designed for students in Japan, not only created a classroom space that was a virtual Japan but also expected students to be “Japanese” in a legal sense. Both Anne (an eijū student) and Tarō (a chūzai student) went along with that expectation. It took another eijū student, who was thinking in terms of the US system, to question that assumption. The teacher’s response, however, characterized the question as somewhat irrelevant in the hoshūkō-bu classroom, where students were learning about Japan without this fact being highlighted.

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5.4.4 On abortion in Korea and other countries The discussion we introduce below occurred on February 3, 2008, in the Level 4 Jackson Course class after one student’s current events presentation on genderspecific abortion in China and Korea and how it was changing in Korea because girls had come to be valued more. Following a brief discussion to clarify the news, the teacher explained the belief of male superiority in Confucius’s teachings. He went on to say that Confucian teachings were alive and well in Korea, China, and Japan. “It is scary, when you think about it,” he said, glancing briefly at Kim. That made Doerr observing the class look at Kim. Kim, born and raised in Korea until she came to the United States at the age of 15, had identified herself as Korean in her interview on May 20, 2007. Formerly a student in the JFL class at JJLS, she had switched to the Jackson Course when a scheduling conflict arose with the JFL class. Doerr felt that Kim’s expression, with her mouth tightly closed and pushed out, showed dissatisfaction. It reminded Doerr of comments Kim had made during her interview on May 20, 2007, about her experience in another class at JJLS. Discussing how JJLS affected her subjectivity, she said that although it was very interesting to learn about Japanese culture, talking about history or current controversies, such as Takeshima, or Tokdo in Korean, made her uncomfortable. Takeshima/Tokdo is an island claimed by both Korea and Japan. She told Doerr she wanted to work at the United Nations to mitigate the issues that divide Korea and Japan. Doerr asked her if she had brought up the Korean viewpoint when the Takeshima/Tokdo issue was discussed in class. She said she had not because other students were young, implying that she would not have been able to carry on a complex conversation with them. Kim was in the 11th grade at the time, but because of the scheduling conflict she was in a class with 5th and 6th graders. Asked if she talked about such frustrations at home, Kim said yes: she had mentioned to her family that the issue of Takeshima/ Tokdo was discussed in class and that it was “interesting”. She then added that she felt strange hearing about Korean comfort women for Japanese during World War II in the news on Saturday and then coming to JJLS on Sunday. However, she quickly added that it did not really matter and that she was grateful to be able to learn Japanese: “Japanese people accept me although I am not Japanese-born. I feel very welcome here.” It is important to note that the interviewer was Doerr, who is Japanese. We suspect the interviewer’s ethnic identification influenced Kim’s answers in that she was likely to exercise restraint in expressing views that might be construed as anti-Japanese, whether about fellow students, JJLS, or the Japanese government. Beyond Kim’s considerate comments to the interviewer, Doerr sensed

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Kim was experiencing some sense of alienation and suppressed anger about the bias favoring Japanese viewpoints within JJLS. For this reason, when Doerr saw Kim’s face after the teacher’s comment “It is scary”, Doerr felt tension, although she knew Kim would be too polite to protest any cultural bias against Korea, even if there was one. However, the teacher continued: “[it’s scary . . . to] end the life before it is born . . . It is an issue debated in the [American] presidential election also.” The teacher thereby brought the discussion around to the issue of abortion in general, not a cultural difference, although his comments suggested his position on abortion, a loaded topic in the United States context. Kim nodded while still showing a dissatisfied facial expression. The teacher continued, explaining that abortion as well as infanticide also happened in Japan when people were poor. “For farmers [. . .] in Japan, farming was the main occupation [. . .] for farmers, it is important to have many family members because they provide a labor force. But until children become old enough to work, children are a burden for poor farmers. The elderly who could not work were also left on the mountain to die. In that sense, both this country [the United States] and Japan are fortunate now.” By bringing up the case of infanticides in old Japan, as well as the exposure of elders, the teacher expanded the issue under discussion into something that was not specific to Korea but applied to other countries, including Japan, where he came from and where most of the students had connections.2

5.4.5 A Jackson Course teacher’s view Doerr interviewed the teacher mentioned above on February 10, 2008. Born and raised in Japan, he had taught in a middle school in Japan for over twenty years before resigning and moving to Jackson with his family in 2007. His wife was American. As a middle school teacher in Japan, he had been sent by the MEXT to a hoshūkō in a different region in the United States for three years. This was his first year teaching in the Jackson Course. When asked how he felt about having students with diverse backgrounds, he said it was “fun”. Then he said he tried to be careful not to hurt students’ feelings. For that day’s current affairs segment, a student had presented news about a Russian plane flying over Japanese airspace. Border issues between 2 Comparing modern Korea and an old, poor part of Japan may be taken as viewing modern Korea as old-fashioned and poor. However, we suspect that the comparison was made because gender-specific abortion is not widely practiced in today’s Japan, where abortion is legal.

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Japan and Russia had been delicate, and he perceived difficulty in discussing them in depth because a student with a Russian background was in the class. He said he tried to incorporate various viewpoints, not just Japanese, and to make sure the discussion did not become an attack on a particular country, especially when students in class had personal connections to that country. Doerr mentioned the previous week’s discussion about gender-specific abortion in Korea, described above. He said he had consciously taken care not to allow the discussion to become an attack on Korea and brought up similar problems happening in other countries, including Japan and the United States. However, he continued, even though he tried to present various viewpoints during current affairs discussions, what he said in other parts of the class influenced the discussions. He raised the example of whale hunting. One day he had taught the class about the Japanese traditional practice of hunting whales and utilizing various parts of the whale. Several weeks later, a student reported on the anti-whaling movement and mentioned whale hunting as a Japanese tradition. The teacher believed he had influenced this student’s presentation, albeit indirectly, and felt uncomfortable about it. He tried not to push the “Japanese viewpoint” on students, he said. Kim’s and her teacher’s interviews, as well as the classroom observation, show that it was not just Japanese culture, including viewpoints, that was taught in this Japanese “heritage” language (keishōgo) class. As her teacher pointed out, some bias toward Japan was unavoidable. However, the teacher made conscious effort to present various culturally connected viewpoints. Paradoxically, then, in this course on Japanese language and culture, the heritage that was noted and respected was the part of the students’ heritage that was not Japanese. Hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course suggested different student subjectivities – as Japanese and as having ties to various countries, respectively – showing how school administrators wished to interpellate students. Some were interpellated according to their wishes, but this was not the case for all, as we see in Chapter 6.

5.5 Molding heritage language learners Administrators at JJLS imagined two different student bodies and their futures. They designed programs accordingly, catering to what they imagined as the students’ differing “needs”, and further shaped the students into particular kinds of Japanese language learners. Foucault’s notion of governmentality and its application to daily practices through Dean’s framework allowed us to examine the nuts and bolts of how teachers governed students by producing particular types of “success” and “failure” and shaping their aspirations, desires, and self-images.

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Hoshūkō-bu students were imagined as “Japanese” students who had a basic understanding of Japanese history and daily life and would return to Japan in the near future – despite the presence of eijū students. Jackson Course students were imagined as Japanese-English bilingual students whose existence was grounded in American life, who were not necessarily familiar with Japanese history or various daily practices in Japan, who had multiple heritages, and who aspired to learn Japanese language for diverse ends rather than follow MEXT’s vision of Japanese proficiency. Administrators designed different modes of governmentality for hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course, and teachers deployed them every Sunday. However, students and parents did not necessarily perceive the difference in a way that administrators and teachers intended. We illustrate such perceptions in the next chapter.

6 Defining the heritage language learner 6.1 Practices and perceptions Administrators’ intentions were often interpreted in unintended ways. This chapter examines the ways students and parents gave meanings to existing programs and the students in them, which became an important part of constructing who the heritage language learner was and its meaning at the grassroots level. Constructing the heritage language learner was to performatively cite a particular regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo education, not that of top- vs. lower-track kokugo education. In the case of JJLS, people’s perceptions of the difference between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course became an important component of the support the Jackson Course received from the MEXT, teachers, parents, and students. While some of the differences in perceptions derived from different ways students had entered JJLS, others originated in their subject positions and views on what constituted legitimate Japanese, as well as the regimes of difference influencing their view of the Jackson Course. Sometimes students sitting in the very same class experienced the same class activity very differently. Here we analyze not only various perceptions of the Jackson Course but also two students’ different experiences of the Jackson Course, suggesting a need for researchers to understand individuals’ perceptions of a given mode of governmentality and offer a critique of research that bases its analyses on the mode of governmentality identified by the researcher, not those who are governed. As discussed in Chapter 1, the same activity can have different effects depending on the mentalities invested in it (Dean 1999). However, little ethnographic research has investigated the competing mentalities of governmentality behind what appears to be the same kind of practice and how individuals experience different modes of government. Instead, much recent work investigates transitions from one to another mode of governmentality, as identified by the researchers (Rose 1996), and how individuals are affected by such shifts as from socialism to neoliberalism (Dunn 2004; Yan 2003), a welfare state to neoliberalism (Molé 2008), or Khmer Buddhism to American individualism (Ong 2003). Andrew Kipnis (2008) critiques such works for uncritically drawing on Rose’s model, viewing whatever actions resembling what Rose argues is neoliberal as evidence of the effects of neoliberalism. What we provide in this chapter pushes Kipnis’s critique one step further: we problematize researchers’ identifying modes of governmentality, because giving meaning and categories of perception to an individual’s daily life is

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a power-laden political act (Bourdieu 1989). What we support instead is to examine the ways individuals give meaning to the way they are (self-)governed (see Doerr and Lee 2012 for further discussion). We first examine how Jackson Course administrators and MEXT officials vied for their interpretations to prevail, with linguistic citizenship and the legitimacy of the Jackson Course at stake. Then we introduce the students’ perceptions of differences between these programs and how these affected decisions (not) to join the Jackson Course. Finally, we compare the perceptions of two students who joined the Jackson Course and their effect on whether or not the students stayed in the Jackson Course after a year there.

6.2 Carving out legitimacy: The Jackson Course administrators and MEXT officials Central to carving out legitimacy for Jackson Course was the question of whether to see the Jackson Course as a less rigorous or lower-track kokugo or keishōgo program. For administrators at JJLS and MEXT officials, three things were at stake. The first was linguistic citizenship. MEXT’s decisions suggested that perceiving a program like the Jackson Course as part of a hoshūkō program would make the Jackson Course legitimate, worthy of Japan’s tax money, and deserving of the MEXT-assigned principal’s time, as discussed in Chapter 4. To be precise, two categories of students held linguistic citizenship and thus deserved Japan’s tax money: those who followed the MEXT-supported hoshūkō curriculum regardless of actual citizenship; and Japanese citizens overseas, regardless of whether they attended hoshūkō. Similarly, only some students were held to deserve Japan’s tax-funded textbook. Students in hoshūkō-bu, regardless of their citizenship, received free textbooks at school. Those in the Jackson Course did not.1 This implies that the decision on who deserved the MEXTcertified textbook at JJLS bought by Japan’s tax money hinged on two criteria: whether one was following the MEXT Course of Study, and Japanese citizenship. Different ministries had different views: Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), for one, tended to view bilingual keishōgo children as Japan’s future assets, according to one MEXT-sent principal. For example, an MFA-sponsored Japanese consulate recently held a reunion for hoshūkō alumni living in the United States. This indicates the MFA’s recognition of the place of keishōgo

1 A child whose parent was a Japanese citizen could receive a free set of certified textbooks via a Japanese consulate upon request.

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learners who do not return to Japan despite the original hoshūkō aim to cater to those who return to Japan. Second, also at stake was the philosophy behind establishing a separate program. JJLS administrators, convinced that the kokugo curriculum was not appropriate for eijū students in terms of their diverse learning needs, linguistic confidence, and cultural belonging, insisted on regarding the Jackson Course as keishōgo education, not kokugo education. This produced a “heritage language effect”: calling a program like the Jackson Course keishōgo (heritage language) education gave legitimacy to the program. Third, the legitimacy of the Jackson Course in the eyes of its students and their parents was at stake. As an administrator between 2004 and 2012, Lee held an annual information meeting to explain the program’s aim to parents of prospective Jackson Course students, but parents and students wavered between viewing the Jackson Course as less rigorous kokugo education and seeing it instead as keishōgo education, influenced partly by their observations and partly by the school administrators’ explanations, as discussed in Chapter 4. Also affecting their views were the subject positions from which students viewed the programs. To illustrate this, we introduce the cases of five students below.

6.3 Deciding (not) to join the Jackson Course: Cases of five students While chūzai and chōki-taizai students took hoshūkō-bu attendance for granted, some eijū students considered choosing between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course. Before the Jackson Course was offered, students who felt out of place in hoshūkō often left JJLS and sought private tutoring or quit learning Japanese altogether. Because a decision to leave JJLS included other factors – scheduling conflicts, commuting distances, etc. – and because the students who left were often leaving the JJLS school community altogether, there was little occasion for these students and parents to discuss their views on Japanese language education and subjectivities with other students and parents. However, once students and parents had an alternative way to learn Japanese within the same school (i.e., the Jackson Course), the factors affecting their decision making narrowed to differences between the programs: the legitimacy of the curricula and teaching methods, as well as the nature of the student body. The programs demanded similar commitment of time and effort, so parents and students had to take a closer look at their reasons for membership in hoshūkō-bu or the Jackson Course, including whether the child would become a “legitimate

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Japanese language speaker”. Also, because they were staying in the same school and continuing to socialize within the JJLS community, parents of Jackson Course students often had occasion to discuss and legitimize the choice to leave hoshūkōbu. Discussions like these constructed the meaning of the Jackson Course. Doerr and Lee witnessed such occasions at school in their capacity as parents and, in Lee’s case, as an administrator. Here we introduce the responses of five eijū students who were interviewed on how they decided whether to join the Jackson Course, coupled with their parents’ accounts. The results show that this process involved each student’s understanding of both the difference between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course – i.e., whether to invoke the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo or that of top- vs. lower-track kokugo education – and what the student wanted in terms of language and subjectivity. We grouped the students into three categories.

6.3.1 “Rescued students” The first group, which we call “rescued students”, consisted of students who found it difficult to keep up with the hoshūkō class linguistically and were “rescued” from abandoning study of Japanese by the existence of the Jackson Course. This group included the kind of students who exhibited “language shyness”, described by Krashen (1998). As mentioned in Chapter 2, some students develop a sense of threat around more linguistically proficient “native speakers” of the language, which can lead to shying away from using/learning the language. To save such students, Krashen has suggested creating a separate class for them. The Jackson Course at JJLS provided such a class, where these students did not have to feel shy about using the language, as seen in Sasha’s case below.

6.3.1.1 Sasha: A Jackson Course old-timer Sasha, who appeared in Chapter 5, impressed Doerr during classroom observation as being easygoing, independent, and able to make friends with everyone. When Doerr interviewed Sasha on May 27, 2007, she said she had been born and raised in the United States (and was thus an eijū student). Her father was Japanese and her mother, Chinese-Malaysian. She had attended JJLS since preschool. When asked what she wanted from JJLS, Sasha said she wanted to learn “how to write and speak in Japanese so that I can go around in Japan by myself”. About her own ethnic identification, Sasha said, “I do think I am American because I was actually born here, even

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though I do also think I am Asian because my parents are and I know how to speak two different languages [Japanese and Chinese]2 besides English.” When asked about what had influenced her identification process, Sasha responded: Personality, looks different. It doesn’t really bother me if somebody, like, excludes me or something because that’s what they think but that’s not what I think about myself inside.

When asked what influence JJLS had on her ethnic identification, she answered that it allowed her to learn Japanese. She added, “Nobody in English school knows Japanese. They think it’s cool that I do.” She did not remember when she moved from the hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course, but her father, who had supported the Jackson Course from the beginning, later told Lee in his interview that she had moved upon entering third grade, when the Jackson Course first opened. Though she did not remember when she left hoshūkō-bu, she did remember that hoshūkō had been hard: Doerr: [. . .] Sasha:

Doerr: Sasha: Doerr: [. . .] Sasha: Doerr: Sasha:

What do you think about hoshūkō class? Actually, I think theirs is a bit harder and it sort of challenges you more and I couldn’t exactly keep up and that’s why my dad put me in the Jackson Course so that I can enjoy it better. Uh huh. So that I can keep up and stuff. Do you have the same image about it still? Yeah. I still remember some parts of it. Okay. Sometimes I didn’t understand what teachers were saying when they called on me and I am like one of the people who didn’t know a lot of the kanji.

When students did not understand something in the Jackson Course, they could ask about it in English and the teacher used English words to explain, which Sasha found useful. In the hoshūkō-bu the teacher never spoke English in class, she said.

2 Sasha had also gone to Chinese language school on Friday nights (for about eight years), but she said she found Chinese more difficult than Japanese.

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In his interview with Lee on March 11, 2007, which was supplemented by an interview with Doerr on May 27, 2007, Sasha’s father, Mr. Sasaki, told us that he had come to the United States from Japan in 1984 to attend a business school. “I was not comfortable in the Japanese society,” he recalled. He had felt that he was in between “Japanese” and “American”, and that his children were “American, or really, Asian American”. He had decided to send his children to JJLS because, he explained, “I did not have time to teach them Japanese myself.” Seeing his children struggle with the workload in the hoshūkō class, he moved them to the Jackson Course because, he said, “I just wanted them to be able to communicate in Japanese with me.” He found the Jackson Course “wonderful” – if not for the Jackson Course, he added, “my children would have stopped coming to JJLS”. He described the Jackson Course as “less demanding”, as the teacher taught at a level appropriate to students and classmates with “similar background and goals”. “It is great that Sasha is in the multicultural [not just Japanese] environment, as Sasha has much in common with them,” he added. Sasha’s shift from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course and awareness of her linguistic proficiency did not challenge her subjectivity in her eyes: from the normative American frame of reference, Sasha is Asian(Japanese)-American regardless. While she commented on her appearance as having somewhat negative effects in the American context, her Japanese language ability had had a positive effect on how her American friends viewed her. Both Sasha and her father viewed the Jackson Course as easier than hoshūkō-bu, reducing the array of teaching styles and goals the Jackson Course offered to a mere difference in “difficulty”. Thus they evoked the regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track kokugo education in viewing the relationship between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course.

6.3.2 “Potential traversers” The second group was composed of what we call “potential traversers”: those who were able to keep up with the kokugo curriculum, although they found it difficult. Their difficulty in hoshūkō-bu arose in two respects: covering a fixed amount of material in a fixed time frame, and learning alongside chūzai students who were more fluent in Japanese than they were. Hoshūkō-bu teachers had to cram a week’s worth of kokugo curriculum into one Sunday afternoon and did not have time to explain things in depth to potential traversers. These students’ perceptions varied and shifted in time, as the cases of Anne, Mayumi, and Junko will show below.

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6.3.2.1 Anne: Staying in hoshūkō-bu Anne seemed quiet yet diligent to Doerr during classroom observation. She also seemed to be respected by other students – they elected her as a Master of Ceremonies for a speech contest, for example. Doerr interviewed Anne on March 17, 2007, a couple of weeks before she completed the 6th grade. Anne chose Japanese as the medium of the interview, but they shifted to English at times. Answering a question on her experience at JJLS, Anne told Doerr that she had come to JJLS in preschool and attended hoshūkō-bu throughout elementary school and up to the start of middle school in 7th grade. As was related in Chapter 1, when asked what she wanted from the Japanese language school, Anne answered that she wanted to learn Japanese language and culture so that she could say “I can speak Japanese” and “I have two cultures.” She further commented, “When I go somewhere and say I am Japanese [. . .] if I didn’t go to Japanese language school, it feels strange. It’s strange to say I cannot speak Japanese but I am Japanese.” Anne said her father was “Japanese” and her mother was “American”. She characterized herself as a “mixture of Japanese and American”. While she liked school events such as field day, Anne did not like homework or kanji in hoshūkō-bu class, which she found difficult. She was critical of chūzai students, who, she felt, had an arrogant attitude because they could speak Japanese very well. However, Anne never thought about joining the Jackson Course because she felt it would be too easy for her: Doerr: [. . .] Anne: Doerr: Anne:

Have you ever thought about moving to the Jackson Course? No, I haven’t. You haven’t. Why? Because to go to Japanese language school is [. . .] to go to school and speak Japanese, so, because I feel people mix Japanese and English in Jackson Course, it is a little too easy, I feel.

Lee interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Akashi, Anne’s parents, on March 18, 2007. Both spoke Japanese in the interview, which Mrs. Akashi left early. They told Lee that they had met in Japan and come to the United States in 1995 upon Mr. Akashi’s decision to attend a business school here. Mrs. Akashi said she was “American”, born in the United States, but had lived in Japan for several years. Mr. Akashi said he was “Japanese” but also said that when he compared himself to chūzai parents just arrived from Japan, he wondered if he was not quite as “Japanese” as he thought.

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Mr. and Mrs. Akashi both wanted their children to be bilingual and thus had been sending them to JJLS, they said. They felt that “chūzai students use Japanese language school as a place to let off steam from the stress of regular school” and were thus “acting up in the classroom”. When asked if he had ever thought about putting Anne in the Jackson Course, Mr. Akashi answered no, because “we wanted her to be 100% bilingual”. He felt that the Jackson Course had “a different goal”. 6.3.2.2 Mayumi: Moved from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course after 6th grade Mayumi, who was introduced as a contrast to Anne in Chapter 1, is one of the students who moved from the hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course during our research period, upon entering the 7th grade. In an interview on February 25, 2007, a month before her move to the Jackson Course, Mayumi told Doerr that she was born and raised in the United States (and thus was an eijū student). As for her ethnic identification, Mayumi said she was “half Japanese, half Russian”. She went on to explain that she had begun JJLS in preschool because her mother wanted her to be able to speak Japanese to her grandparents. As for JJLS’s influence on her, she mentioned that it “gives me a sense of being Japanese”. When asked why she wanted to switch to the Jackson Course, Mayumi replied: the hoshūkō-bu is fast-paced because we have to do a week’s worth of work in one day. So, they don’t take time to explain, and it is hard for me to understand because I’m not advanced in Japanese . . . Some find it just the right speed because they came from Japan and are here for a short time. Japanese is their native language and it comes naturally to them. For me, Japanese is my second language and it takes a while to think in Japanese . . . I cannot understand things sometimes. It is frustrating. When I give up, it becomes boring. In regular school, I know all the language and I can form questions better.

When Doerr asked several questions regarding Mayumi’s previous view of the Jackson Course, whether she had thought about joining it before, and why she was moving to the Jackson Course, Mayumi explained as follows. Several years earlier, when her mother had first introduced the idea that she move there, she wondered, “Why change now?” However, Mayumi’s mother, Mrs. Michaels, recalled in her interview with Lee on June 10, 2007, that Mayumi’s first response was negative. Mayumi had felt that the Jackson Course “was for dropouts”. However, Mayumi explained in her interview on February 25, 2007, a month before her move to the Jackson Course, that upon entering middle school Mayumi had wondered whether “teachers in the Jackson Course might explain things better” and gone to the trial class. There Mayumi had been able to

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“understand everything the teacher said” and decided to move to the Jackson Course. Doerr’s participant observation in both hoshūkō-bu and Jackson Course classes revealed a striking difference in the way Mayumi behaved. In hoshūkō-bu class she had been very quiet, although she gave correct answers whenever the teacher called on her. She appeared to be marginalized by the talkative chūzai students who dominated casual conversation. In the Jackson Course, however, Mayumi was very active and talkative, initiating discussions and even teasing the teacher. Mrs. Michaels told Lee in her interview on June 10, 2007, that she had come to the United States in the 1980s to attend a university. “I disliked the expectation in Japan that everyone has to act the same way”, she said. She married “an American” and stayed in the United States. Mrs. Michaels said, “I might have forgotten about Japan if Mayumi was not born.” Mrs. Michaels felt that coming to JJLS and learning Japanese language and culture had helped Mayumi realize that she was “Japanese”. However, Mrs. Michaels found the homework to be too much and the kanji too difficult. She thought “the diversity of students in hoshūkō-bu [some chūzai and some eijū] is natural”. In the past, however, she said, “some chūzai students misbehaved, letting the steam off their frustration in English environment at regular school. Some of them even teased mistakes made by some eijū students. The problem ended when such chūzai students went back to Japan.” As soon as the Jackson Course began, Mrs. Michaels suggested that Mayumi join, as mentioned. In Mrs. Michaels’s view, “the Jackson Course prepares students for an Advanced Placement Japanese course in the US high schools” and used “real” Japanese with an experienced teacher.

6.3.2.3 Junko: Regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track class Junko was a relatively quiet student in class. She had one good friend in hoshūkō-bu and stayed only with her at recess. In the interview Doerr and Lee carried out on February 4, 2007, she identified her family’s ethnicity thus: “Mother, mostly Japanese [. . .] Father is American, [. . .] I am somewhere in between.” She was born and raised in the United States (an eijū student). The interview was done two months before she moved from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course going into 7th grade. Junko chose English as the medium of interview. When we asked what she had found fun about coming to JJLS, she answered, “Kanji. My friends in middle school like manga [Japanese comic strips]. I can teach them how to write the letter ai [love]. Japanese language school helps me teach Japanese better to my friends in middle school.” When

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we asked what kind of image she had of the Jackson Course, Junko said she had once thought it was “for people with disability and slow learners”. However, her mother had convinced her otherwise, she said. Doerr interviewed Junko’s mother, Ms. Jones, on February 11 and February 25, 2007. As Ms. Jones had succeeded Doerr in a position in a JJLS parent association, Doerr and Ms. Jones knew each other well, which encouraged an informal tone in the interview. To the question about personal background, Ms. Jones responded that she had come to the United States to attend college, met her husband, and settled in the United States. When asked if she had ever considered moving Junko to the Jackson Course, Ms. Jones explained that upon the launch of the Jackson Course when Junko was in 3rd grade, Ms. Jones had gone to a trial class. There she found that “the teacher seemed to be going through trial and error”. She had once thought the Jackson Course was for people who could not keep up in hoshūkō-bu. School administrators at the time had explained to her that the Jackson Course was “easier and slower with less homework”, she said. Because “Junko had good friends and she was keeping up with the class”, she had felt there was no need for her to change classes then. However, at the point of Junko’s entry into middle school, Ms. Jones had rekindled the idea of the Jackson Course for Junko after administrators told her the Level 4 Jackson Course would be at the middle-school level but take an approach different from the kokugo curriculum. In the trial class, Ms. Jones saw two other students who had studied in hoshūkō-bu up to then. Because “Junko does not have to think about entrance examinations in Japan, even if it does not work out, Junko has nothing to lose”, Ms. Jones said. She felt that “the curriculum in hoshūkō-bu emphasizes the textbook material, namely, kokugo [. . .] It would be more helpful for Junko to approach Japanese language differently, but it really depends on the teacher because there are no manuals.” Since she felt that the teacher for the Level 4 Jackson Course was “wonderful”, Ms. Jones decided to let Junko join the Jackson Course. As will be discussed later, Junko moved back to hoshūkō-bu after one year in the Jackson Course. Potential traversers (had) regarded the Jackson Course as being for students who needed some English to understand the class content (Anne), dropouts (Mayumi, according to her mother), and people with disabilities and slow learners (Junko). They did not recognize any legitimacy or cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) in what the Jackson Course offered in comparison to what hoshūkō-bu offered: the Jackson Course provided merely less or a lower quality of what hoshūkō-bu offered. The regime of difference their view relied on and further perpetuated was that of a top (hoshūkō-bu) vs. a lower (Jackson Course) track.

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This regime of difference suggests the deficit model used in the study of education, especially in studies that seek reasons for minority groups’ “academic underachievement” in order to reduce it. The deficit model regards minoritygroup cultural practices – especially those affecting learning behavior – that differ from those of the mainstream as deficits in a similar way to Bernstein introduced in Chapter 2. This model is also called the deprivationist approach (Deutsch 1967). Critique of its ethnocentrism engendered the cultural difference approach, which views minority groups’ practices as merely different ways of doing things rather than as deficits (Jacob and Jordan 1993). This position now enjoys wide acceptance, but some criticize it for taking the boundaries of minority groups and their stability for granted (Varenne and McDermott 1995). Viewing the Jackson Course through the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo indexes this difference model, whereas viewing it through the regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track class indexes the deficit/deprivationist model. Mayumi’s ability to understand class content was what pushed her to decide in favor of the Jackson Course. She felt that hoshūkō-bu covered material too fast for her. Mayumi understood the difference between those who were and were not able to keep up in hoshūkō-bu as a difference between students for whom Japanese was or was not the “native language”, rather than a difference in academic ability. She just needed the teacher to explain things more and in depth. Hoping the Jackson Course teacher would do so, she went to the trial class of the Jackson Course and found it suited her. That is, for Mayumi, moving from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course came to be not about dropping out because of inability to keep up academically in hoshūkō-bu but rather about the amount of time a teacher needed to provide her with a full understanding of the content, in view of her linguistic background. Thus, Mayumi’s imagined community of speakers (Anderson 1991; Pavlenko 2002) in the Jackson Course transformed from dropouts into students learning Japanese outside the prescriptions of kokugo education while keeping the same linguistic quality. This was a shift from the deficit model to the difference model. In due course, Mayumi redefined herself as a “Japanese speaker” different from hoshūkō-bu students, but a “Japanese speaker” nonetheless. Here, the regime of difference is that of kokugo vs. keishōgo. Mrs. Michaels had always supported the choice of the Jackson Course for Mayumi. In realizing that it could prepare Mayumi for an AP Japanese exam – i.e., in placing the Jackson Course in the context of American education – Ms. Michaels was not using MEXT’s yardstick. Junko’s mother, having switched from a deficit to a difference model in her perception of the Jackson Course, convinced her daughter to join it. But only after beginning to see the linguistic levels in hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course as the same did Ms. Jones begin thinking of the Jackson Course as an option for

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Junko. Ms. Jones liked the idea that the Jackson Course included angles not found in kokugo textbooks, a feature she had been aware of since the Jackson Course was first available. But this alone did not push her to move Junko to the Jackson Course. The administrator’s explanation that the Jackson Course would be at the same level as hoshūkō-bu and the realization that two other hoshūkō-bu students would be joining the Jackson Course led Ms. Jones to approve of the Jackson Course for Junko. In other words, once Ms. Jones began seeing the relationship between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course not through the regime of top-track vs. lower-track kokugo class (deficit model) but through the regime of kokugo vs. keishōgo program (difference model), she accepted the Jackson Course. Anne, on the other hand, stuck with hoshūkō-bu despite feeling uncomfortable with chūzai students. To say “I can speak Japanese” and “I am Japanese”, Anne felt she had to make it through the kokugo education in hoshūkō alongside the more fluent chūzai students. For her, moving to Jackson Course would have been dropping out, because she believed that the Jackson Course mixed English and Japanese. Norton (2000: 10–11) has stated that “when language learners speak, they are not only exchanging information with target language speakers, but they are constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world. Thus an investment in the target language is also an investment in a learner’s own identity.” Anne’s choice of Japanese for interviews, in contrast to Mayumi and Junko, illuminates this “investment” of hers. Her father thought Jackson Course students would not be “100% bilingual”, indicating that for him, full competence in “Japanese” was nurtured only in hoshūkō-bu. As Anne and her father saw it, the Jackson Course did not offer legitimate knowledge of “Japanese”. They perceived “being Japanese”, “speaking Japanese”, and kokugo education in hoshūkō-bu as mutually connected. This connection reflects the Japanese nation-building discourse linking standardized linguistic competence to nationhood, whose tool has been compulsory kokugo education (Yasuda 2003). In their view of the difference between hoshūkō and the Jackson Course, Anne and her parents evoked the regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track kokugo education, i.e., the deficit model. Anne and her parents also had monologic perceptions of bilingualism, which “treat each of the child’s languages as separate and whole, and view the two languages as bounded autonomous systems” (García 2008: 6). This contrasts with heterologic views of bilingualism, which allow multiple coexisting norms to characterize bilingual speech (García 2008: 117). The Jackson Course supports the heterologic view. The key difference between Mayumi, Junko, and Anne lay in their views on what constituted “knowing Japanese”. Mayumi said that even though competence in Japanese was not essential, she felt more “Japanese” because she

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knew the language. Later, when she chose to attend the Jackson Course, she did not necessarily tie “knowing Japanese” to the government-prescribed gradespecific kokugo curriculum. For Junko, “knowing Japanese” was about teaching American friends at her everyday school how to write Japanese characters. She judged her own Japaneseness from an American frame of reference, as Sasha did. For Anne, though, the Japanese language outside kokugo education in hoshūkō-bu was not good enough, especially if English was used in the classroom. In short, Mayumi, Junko, and Anne had different imaginings of a community of “Japanese language speakers”, and by extension, of “legitimate Japanese”. Their imaginings reflected their own subjectivities as members of that community, affecting their choice of programs. The difference between rescued students and potential traversers was their level of language proficiency: the former’s proficiency gave them no choice but to join the Jackson Course, while the latter’s proficiency gave them a choice, in which subjectivity mattered more than language proficiency.

6.3.3 “System outsiders” Members of the third group were what we call “system outsiders”. They (and their parents) chose the Jackson Course because they had never received kokugo education and saw no need to do so. That is, they were outside the system of kokugo education. Here, proficiency in Japanese language was irrelevant. Martin was such a student.

6.3.3.1 Martin: Starting JJLS in the Jackson Course During participant observation in the Jackson Course Level 3 classes, Martin actively participated in class discussion and seemed to be comfortable with the class content and materials. He seemed to be one of the strongest students in class. Doerr interviewed him on March 4, 2007, in Japanese. To the standard questions about his experience of Japanese language, Martin answered that in the past several years, he had attended schools in Japan for at least four weeks in summer whenever he and his family went to Japan. Martin told Doerr he had begun attending JJLS in September 2005, when he was in 4th grade, because his parents thought he should learn to read and write in Japanese. Martin joined the Jackson Course when he first joined JJLS. Unless a student had been learning kokugo since 1st grade, joining hoshūkō-bu was difficult because of the way certain content, especially kanji, was assigned in each grade.

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As for the question about his family’s ethnic identification, Martin said his father was “American” and his mother was “Japanese”. Martin considered himself “Japanese” because he was born in Japan, although he had lived in the United States since he was one year old. Asked what influenced his “identity”, he said coming to JJLS and learning Japanese made him feel more “Japanese”. Being born in Japan and speaking Japanese were what made a person “Japanese”, he said, but added that when he played with his American friends, he felt that he was American. Martin expressed his view of hoshūkō-bu and Jackson Course in the interview as follows: Doerr:

Martin: Doerr: Martin:

If you compare the Jackson Course and hoshūkō-bu, what’s the difference in the image you have about them? The image of hoshūkō-bu and that of Jackson Course [. . .] Hoshūkō-bu seems a little more “Japanese” and a little more difficult. It seems difficult. How about the Jackson Course? Um, a little easier.

On March 18, 2007, Lee interviewed Martin’s mother, Mrs. Moore. To the standard question about background, Mrs. Moore explained that she had come to the United States “to learn English” and had met and married her husband there. “My children will live as Americans”, she said, “but I am Japanese because my parents are Japanese and I was born in Japan.” About things that influenced her “identity”, she said, “sending my children to JJLS and making my own Japanese friends there make me feel closer to Japan.” She liked the Jackson Course because “Martin can have friends with a similar background to speak Japanese with”. There was “no pressure because it is more about exposing the children to Japanese language than test scores”. She felt that the Jackson Course deepened Martin’s confidence, especially because he could visualize his progress through “learning more kanji and compare his Japanese to other students of his age”. She was pleased that teachers used teaching materials besides kokugo textbooks. As for the image she had of the Jackson Course, Mrs. Moore had not realized that the Jackson Course was considered “a dropout class” until her children began attending; however, she said, “I feel that such a perception is changing.” Martin enjoyed the Jackson Course as “Japanese” while acknowledging that hoshūkō students were “more Japanese”. Although he could have kept up in hoshūkō-bu class linguistically, Martin’s mother had signed him up for the Jackson Course because it taught Japanese outside of kokugo education. Although Martin saw the difference between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course in the difficulty

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of the content and the hoshūkō-bu students’ being more “Japanese”, he and his mother viewed the Jackson Course as offering legitimate Japanese instruction. That is, while they evoked both of the two regimes of difference mentioned earlier, that of kokugo vs. keishōgo came out stronger. As described in Chapters 4 and 8, in an effort to support the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo, Lee, an administrator, consciously informed parents about the Jackson Course’s different idea of proficiency, assuring them that proficiency could be attained outside the kokugo curriculum. Despite this, the interviews above show that some students and parents retained the perception that the Jackson Course was an “easy class” for dropouts, and that what it offered was illegitimate compared to what hoshūkō-bu offered. Other interviewees shared this perception. When we interviewed students in both hoshūkō-bu and Jackson Course and their parents in 2007, asking whether they had ever thought about switching to the other program and why (see Doerr and Lee 2009 for details), the main responses were that the Jackson Course was designed for students with less proficiency in Japanese 3 and/or those without plans to go back to Japan to live.4 Jackson Course students and their parents emphasized the course’s lighter workload compared to hoshūkō-bu.5 Some Jackson Course parents also mentioned that the Jackson Course did not follow the MEXT Course of Study and thus was flexible. However, such views could change, as this chapter below and Chapter 8 show, and more Jackson Course students and parents came to view the Jackson Course as not only less vigorous but also suiting their needs. These students’ and parents’ perceptions developed not only in response to the administrator’s explanation but also via their own experiences and perceptions, particularly with regard to the pace and in-depth explanations the Jackson Course curriculum offered (Sasha, Sasha’s father, Mayumi, Martin, Martin’s mother), observation of the types of students who attended the Jackson Course (Sasha’s father, Mayumi, Junko’s mother, Martin, Martin’s mother), others’ comments on the class (Anne), its relevance to education in the US context (Mayumi’s

3 Many hoshūkō-bu students shared this view. Some said: “[The Jackson course is] for those who cannot speak Japanese very well. [That is,] those who can speak English well”; “It was like JFL class, but with more Japanese as a medium of instruction”; “Students [in Jackson Course] learn it [Japanese] slow. Not that they don’t know it, but they learn it slower than this [hoshūkō-bu] class.” 4 For example, an eijū student in hoshūkō-bu who had lived in Japan from 1st to 4th grade said the Jackson Course was “an easy course for those who do not go back to Japan but keep their Japanese while living in the United States”. 5 For example, some Jackson Course students said: “[The Jackson Course] is easier than regular [hoshūkō-bu] class”; “[Hoshūkō-bu class] is harder”; “[Hoshūkō-bu] challenges you more. I couldn’t keep up”; “[Hoshūkō-bu is] more intense”.

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mother), subjectivities as “Japanese” (Mayumi, Anne, Martin), and subjectivities as bilingual individuals (Mayumi, Anne, Anne’s father). All these viewpoints performatively cite regimes of difference and define what the Jackson Course is about. In so doing, they construct the picture of the keishōgo learner as someone who approaches Japanese language outside the MEXT prescription. In the interviews, the notion of keishōgo learner was approved as a choice of subject position when it was defined as something other than a dropout.

6.4 One classroom, two perceptions, two modes of governmentality In this section, we focus on two potential traversers who had once been skeptical about the Jackson Course but wound up joining it later: Mayumi and Junko. They attended the same Jackson Course for the whole school year, but our interviews revealed that the modes of governmentality Junko and Mayumi experienced that year differed significantly. As a result, Mayumi stayed in the Jackson Course when they entered 8th grade, but Junko moved back to hoshūkō-bu. By examining these two cases, we illustrate how the same class activities worked as very different modes of governmentality, depending on the perception of the program. Mayumi and her mother leaned toward the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo education. However, Junko and her mother wavered between regimes of difference, finally settling on that of top-track vs. lower-track kokugo class. These different views affected the ways the learners were governed. Mayumi was governed as an English-Japanese bilingual, keishōgo learner in the United States. Junko, in contrast, was governed as a student in a lower-track class compared to hoshūkō-bu students, perceived as top-track. In other words, these students experienced different modes of governmentality – lower-track kokugo or keishōgo – in the same classroom. We introduce their experiences below.

6.4.1 Mayumi: Staying in the Jackson Course In an “occasional” interview (separate from the standard interviews of students at the beginning and end of the research period) on February 1, 2009, after Mayumi had spent nearly two years in the Jackson Course, Doerr asked Mayumi to compare hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course. Mayumi said class was more interactive in the Jackson Course in comparison to hoshūkō-bu, where the teacher lectured the whole time. Also, although hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course used the same MEXT-prescribed textbook, the textbooks were treated differently:

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Hoshūkō-bu offers only one angle: an academic one. It’s not interesting. Even if we are reading an interesting story, what we study about it is not interesting. In the Jackson Course, we learn various things from the story. When we learned about John Manjirō’s story [described in Chapter 5], we learned about the history of Japan [. . .] In the regular class [hoshūkō-bu], whatever the story is, the way we studied was boring. In the Jackson Course, the way we study, we learn more. The history and go more into it. Branch off. We talk more about the part even if it has nothing to do with the story. More useful general knowledge. In hoshūkō[-bu], we learned things that we never use [. . .] In the Jackson Course, we learn more. Isolationism, history [. . . The Jackson Course teaches] things that are obvious to all-Japanese people, but not to us. For example, [the teacher] explained to us about Japan’s New Year tradition.

However, Mayumi also said she sometimes considered going back to hoshūkō-bu, because “the Jackson Course is easier than hoshūkō-bu. I grew up in that class [hoshūkō-bu]. So, the Jackson Course seems to be at a lower level. I am at that level [laughs], but sometimes it feels easy.” When asked what kind of advice she would give a student pondering the choice between hoshūkō-bu or the Jackson Course, Mayumi summarized the characteristics of the Jackson Course as: “good for students who have a small vocabulary in Japanese. The Jackson Course takes time to study a story, examining the content of the story deeper, going more in depth. The teacher pays more attention to each student. It is not for students who have a high proficiency level. The Jackson Course does not offer high-level work.” When Lee interviewed Mrs. Michaels on March 8, 2009, Mrs. Michaels said that in hoshūkō-bu there had been too many students for Mayumi to get the chance to participate in class discussions, and that to cover the MEXT curriculum, “the teacher moved forward regardless of whether or not all the students understood the content covered.” In contrast, given the small number of students in the Jackson Course, “Mayumi was forced to participate in class discussions, which was good.” Mrs. Michaels recalled that when Mayumi had first begun the Jackson Course, she had told her mother that the class was for less able students. Mrs. Michaels stressed that “the school should be clearer about the Jackson Course’s position as a keishōgo class [not a lower-track class].”

6.4.2 Junko: Moving back to hoshūkō-bu from the Jackson Course After a year in the Jackson Course, Junko moved back to hoshūkō-bu in April 2008. Toward the end of her 8th grade year in hoshūkō-bu, almost a year after her return to the section, Doerr interviewed Junko’s mother and Junko on January 18 and February 22, 2009, respectively. When Doerr asked why she had moved back to hoshūkō-bu, Junko said it was because her friends were there. Junko

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compared the two programs as follows: The Jackson Course had less homework and kanji three grades behind the MEXT curriculum, and students there learned more about current affairs, which she liked. Hoshūkō-bu had a bigger workload, more homework, and more grade-level kanji, and its students learned writing, reading, and history, Junko said. During class in the Jackson Course, “students were more active, the teacher was funnier and more engaging, and the class was less boring than in hoshūkō-bu.” She also mentioned sometimes needing English translations of Japanese words: in the Jackson Course, the teacher let her speak in English and then in Japanese, but this was not the case in hoshūkō-bu, she said. Although she had a positive opinion of many features of the Jackson Course, she was “glad to be back [in hoshūkō-bu]” because “my friends are in hoshūkō-bu” and she “missed the class environment”. She said she would advise others to attend the Jackson Course if they preferred a smaller workload. In the interview, Ms. Jones said she had moved Junko back to hoshūkō-bu for two reasons. First, in the Jackson Course it was difficult to support Junko’s schoolwork at home because there was little homework, which did not allow her to judge where Junko stood in relation to the class’s expectations or help Junko deepen her study. Second, the level of kanji taught in the Jackson Course differed from that in hoshūkō-bu. She said, “I sent Junko to the Jackson Course not because schoolwork is easier in the Jackson Course but because the Jackson Course has different ways of teaching – student-centered approach cultivating Japanese language and culture following students’ interests – rather than covering textbook material assigned for that week.”

6.4.3 Perceptions and experienced governmentality Junko and Mayumi present contrasting cases of students’ (and parents’) changing views of the relationship between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course and their consequently different experiences of the Jackson Course. Once in the Jackson Course, Mayumi and Junko interpreted the difference between hoshūkōbu and the Jackson Course using two different yardsticks: one set by the MEXT curriculum, citing the regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track kokugo class; and the other set by the JJLS administrators, citing the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo. Mayumi interpreted the difference between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course in terms of their relevance to Japanese-English bilingual students living in the United States: she understood the difference through the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo education. For her, the Jackson Course offered indepth explanation of the textbook’s contents, approached the textbook from various angles, provided useful knowledge, explained knowledge of daily life

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that may be obvious to chūzai students, and allowed teachers to give students a lot of attention. These classroom practices helped Mayumi deepen her understanding of content covered in the textbook in comparison to hoshūkō-bu, where a fast pace was necessary to cover the curriculum at the same pace as a school in Japan. Though she mainly used the yardstick of whether a program’s approach helped her understand class materials, Mayumi was using MEXT’s yardstick to assess the Jackson Course when she described the Jackson Course as having a small vocabulary and low level of knowledge of Japanese language. Mrs. Michaels reported that at first Mayumi had thought students in the Jackson Course were less able. Mayumi also wanted to feel that her linguistic proficiency, using MEXT’s yardstick, was at the level of hoshūkō-bu at times, although it was not, as her ironic laugh indicated. However, that yardstick did not prevail, and Mayumi remained in the Jackson Course when she entered 8th grade. For Mayumi and her mother, who saw the Jackson Course’s smaller workload as giving Japanese-English bilingual students more time to understand the material from various angles and to obtain deep understanding, to be in the Jackson Course was to be governed through the mode of governmentality of keishōgo in the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo classes. In contrast, Junko and Ms. Jones described the Jackson Course in terms of the regime of difference of top- vs. lower-track class. MEXT’s yardstick was used to assess the level of kanji taught in the Jackson Course: three grades behind. Ms. Jones interpreted the Jackson Course’s intention of ensuring each student’s understanding, rather than setting a standard for all the students to strive for, as lacking guidelines for parents wishing to push the student at home to keep up with class expectations indicated by homework content. Junko did appreciate the Jackson Course’s approach – presenting current affairs, being allowed to use English in class, having an engaging and funny teacher, and encouraging more active participation by students – and Ms. Jones did appreciate the current affairs presentations. However, in their evaluation the MEXT’s kokugo yardstick prevailed. Ms. Jones decided that the Jackson Course was not challenging enough for Junko and moved her back to hoshūkō-bu, which Junko welcomed as she wanted to be with her friends in hoshūkō-bu. For Junko and her mother, who regarded the Jackson Course’s smaller workload as accommodating students with low ability, to be in the Jackson Course was to be governed through the mode of governmentality of a low-track kokugo class in the regime of difference of top-track vs. lower-track kokugo classes. In short, depending on which yardstick and corresponding regime of difference prevailed, Junko and Mayumi experienced different modes of governmentality in the same classroom of the Jackson Course.

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6.5 Legitimacy, meanings, and modes of governmentality Hoshūkō-bu followed a MEXT-prescribed Course of Study intended to develop language competence on a timeline based on a MEXT-set standard for measuring progress. This accorded with the expectation that hoshūkō-bu students were Japanese who would return to Japan. In contrast, the Jackson Course governed students with a custom-made curriculum, keeping in mind their bilingual background and respecting their diverse and multiple heritages. Though both curricula met particular student needs, perceptions of these programs were ambiguous because two regimes of difference coexisted: top-track vs. lower-track kokugo class, and kokugo vs. keishōgo program. Such perceptions affected the legitimacy of the Jackson Course from particular groups’ standpoints. The school administrators who established the Jackson Course viewed it as keishōgo education, not a lower-track kokugo class, and they felt that for students in the program and their parents, this perception conferred legitimacy on the Jackson Course. However, as long as the Jackson Course was considered keishōgo education, not a low-track kokugo class in hoshūkō-bu, it could not expect financial or human resources support from the Japanese government, for which the notion of linguistic citizenship was key. This, on the other hand, freed the JJLS from MEXT constraints in terms of program building. Students’ different perceptions of the relationships between hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course guided their decisions on whether to join the Jackson Course and led them to experience the same Jackson Course class differently. When the regime of difference of top-track vs. lower-track kokugo class prevailed, Anne, Mayumi, and Junko all resisted joining. Sasha, on the other hand, joined the Jackson Course gladly, showing that rescued students’ perceptions of language proficiency and expectations differed from potential traversers’. Only when the regime of difference of kokugo vs. keishōgo class prevailed did Mayumi and Junko decide to join the Jackson Course. Once in the Jackson Course, Mayumi was governed as a Japanese-English bilingual student and a keishōgo learner in the United States, while Junko was governed as a low-track kokugo class student. Martin, as a system outsider, was governed as a bilingual/keishōgo student in the United States from the beginning. We discuss these situations in terms of, first, invested meaning and the mode of governmentality, and second, the creation of legitimacy and schooling. 6.5.1 Competing mentalities of governmentality and invested meanings The cases examined above, especially those of Mayumi and Junko, show how, depending on individuals’ perceptions, the same activity can function as very different modes of governmentality, producing very different legitimacies and

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subjectivities. Most studies of governmentality focus on how a particular mode of governmentality affects individuals, who respond to it in various ways (Dunn 2004, 2008; Molé 2008; Yan 2003). Departing from this prevalent focus to instead examine the ways individuals give meanings to various experiences, this chapter has argued that it is individuals who summon the mode of governmentality by investing it with meanings. As discussed in Chapter 1, a single activity can be seen as different forms of governmentality depending on what meanings different participants give to the activity. The cases we discussed above support this suggestion by Dean (1999) and open up ways to analyze both how the mode of governmentality affects individuals, and how individuals’ perceptions influence the effects of the mode of governmentality. This is a critique of researcher-centered analysis of modes of governmentality, which may overlook their meanings as well as their efficacy. As Chapter 8 contends, this critique has practical implications for school administrators. Jackson Course students’ and parents’ perceptions, analyzed in this chapter, were consequential, for they influenced the operations of the Jackson Course. As shown in Chapter 3, the Jackson Course continued to grow and develop, responding not only to the needs of its changing student population but also to perceptions of prospective students and parents. 6.5.2 Creation of legitimacy and schooling The ways students and their parents perceived the Jackson Course and their subjectivities in relation to it were complex and cannot be analyzed adequately by the existing analytical framework of heritage language education that focuses on the learner’s position in mainstream society or language acquisition processes. Krashen (1998) describes the situation of students like Sasha, Mayumi, and Anne in relation to those with “native-like” proficiency, but his suggestions for creating a separate class need to be situated in an understanding of schooling processes. Because of the students’ perceptions of the Jackson Course – the type of domain Krashen advocates – it worked for Sasha, who had struggled linguistically in hoshūkō-bu, but it did not work for Anne, who was able, with some struggle, to keep up with the hoshūkō-bu program and viewed staying in hoshūkō-bu as an important part of her being “Japanese”.6 What mattered to 6 In our interviews and classroom observations, we noticed that students’ language proficiency in Japanese could not be measured by how they became bilingual (i.e., whether they were “simultaneous” or “successive” bilinguals). For example, some simultaneous bilinguals were as proficient in Japanese as successive bilinguals who had been monolingual Japanese speakers first.

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students like Anne was whether she could recognize the Jackson Course’s offerings as legitimate, which reflected her subjectivity as a “Japanese”. Educational researchers argue that the school conveys general understandings of what knowledge is considered legitimate and how certain differences among students should be noted and made consequential (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Varenne and McDermott 1999). Thus, school is often a site of contestation over which knowledge should be considered legitimate (Apple and Weis 1983; Giroux 2001; Jacob and Jordan 1993; Olneck 2000). The contestation among the school administrator (Lee), students, and parents over the position of Jackson Course, analyzed above, can be understood as such a contestation of the legitimacy of the keishōgo curriculum in the Jackson Course. The contestation of the Jackson Course’s legitimacy has to be viewed in relation to an already established and legitimized hoshūkō-bu class. In Japan, the Japanese government has made kokugo education legitimate for over a century. So for many years, the legitimacy of kokugo curriculum in hoshūkō programs was never questioned. By offering an alternative to hoshūkō and striving to become legitimate, the Jackson Course challenged the hegemony of kokugo education in hoshūkō as the only legitimate education. In that process, what gave the Jackson Course legitimacy was to name it as a new type of education – keishōgo education – rather than as less rigorous kokugo education. Here is a “heritage language effect”. In the next chapter, we shift gears to investigate what pushed students to stay or leave JJLS and how the heritage language learner subjectivity of those who stayed changed as their frame of reference shifted from that of Japan to that of the United States.

7 Shifting frames of reference: JJLS, AP, heading college, and construction of the Japanese-as-aheritage-language learner 7.1 What makes one continue learning a heritage language Individuals are constructed as subjects through attending JJLS. The Japanese government (Chapter 4) and JJLS administrators (Chapters 4 and 5) sought to construct hoshūkō-bu students as “Japanese” subjects and the Jackson Course students as keishōgo learners. Students constructed themselves and each other as “Japanese”, keishōgo learners, dropouts, or Japanese-Americans in the process of negotiating which program they belonged to (Chapter 6). One question we have not yet asked is why these individuals even bothered at all to involve themselves in Japanese language study while living in the United States, spending every Sunday afternoon at JJLS even when regular American school was out of session for the summer (JJLS has only six weeks of summer break). This question was especially important for eijū students. Chūzai and chōki-taizai students came to JJLS to prepare for their return to Japan by making up the Japanese education they were missing while they were away. Without any such plan to return to the Japanese education system, some eijū students attended JJLS for many years, while others did not.1 This chapter explores this basic yet complex question by examining what motivated eijū students to sustain their involvement in Japanese language study via JJLS and how their motivations changed throughout the years. In doing so, it highlights the role of the American educational context, which we have not investigated thus far. Many eijū students began attending JJLS at age three and continued from preschool all the way up to the end of high school (12th grade). Their subjectivity in relation to the Japanese language changed in the course of those fifteen years. 1 There were some exceptions. For example, we originally considered Kumiko an eijū student because her family had no plans to return to Japan (see Doerr and Lee 2010 for details). However, she decided to go to college in Japan, leaving her family in the United States. This decision was due partly to her family background. She was born to Japanese parents and lived in Japan until the age of six, when her parents divorced. Then, while her father lived in Japan, Kumiko lived with her mother in the United States, Italy, and Canada before coming to area served by JJLS. She attended hoshūkō wherever she lived, except in Italy, where she had a Japanese tutor. After her mother remarried, Kumiko lived with her mother, her Greek stepfather, and their two children. In early middle school Kumiko decided to attend a Japanese college, and she attended the JJLS high school program mainly for the purpose of preparing for the Japanese college entrance examination.

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This chapter traces this shift based on interviews with students and parents and participant observations during our four years of fieldwork. We focus on two issues in particular. First, we trace changing motivations for attending JJLS through three stages: first, preschool to early elementary school; second, late elementary to middle school; and third, the high school stage. We investigate what made some students stay and others leave JJLS as well as what made some students continue learning Japanese language after leaving JJLS. The second issue we focus on is the change from a Japanese to an American frame of reference in the second and third stages. When JJLS transformed its eijū students into keishōgo learners, whether through program membership or peer dynamics, the frame of reference was that of Japan. Added to this, in the later stages, was construction of subjectivities – English-Japanese bilingual, Japanese (in relation to Americans), Japanese-American – based on the frame of reference of the United States. Also, students’ subjectivities as heritage language learners of Japanese changed from keishōgo learners contrasted to Japanese “native speakers” or kokugo learners (first and second stages) into heritage language learners of Japanese contrasted to foreign language learners of Japanese in the United States (third stage). While the former designated only the Jackson Course students who viewed themselves as such, the latter included all JJLS students from both hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course. We use the term Japanese-as-aheritage-language (JHL) learner for the latter when the notion of heritage language learner of Japanese was constructed in opposition to the Japanese-asa-foreign-language (JFL) learner, in order to differentiate it from keishōgo learners. We will discuss this shift by focusing on the role of AP Japanese, a college-level Japanese language exam for high school students, introduced in Chapter 3. Most studies on heritage language education are short-term, focusing on heritage language learners’ current state in order to devise pedagogy that matches their needs. The changing experiences of individuals in relation to their heritage language learner status are rarely examined. Personal history and individuals’ relationships to language are examined only retrospectively, so as to understand the current situation (e.g., He 2006). Our study, in contrast, is based on long-term fieldwork spanning four years, following a group of students from 6th grade to 10th to observe their changing institutional belonging, perceptions, and peer dynamics. The resulting longitudinal data underlie this chapter’s examination of the students’ various trajectories and changing frames of reference, and its investigation of the factors that influenced them. By pointing out the mainstream society’s role in students’ continuing study of Japanese, we also seek to address questions that concern not only researchers of minority language education but also school administrators and parents:

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What makes a child want to keep learning his/her heritage language? And by extension, what wider contexts support children’s learning of heritage languages? In what follows, we will review the relationships between minority language education and the mainstream education system, briefly survey the place of Japanese language in US mainstream education, introduce cases of three students at JJLS, and discuss their changing motivations and frame of reference as well as the role of the AP Japanese examination.

7.2 Minority language education and the mainstream educational system “Minority issues” are less about the minority groups than about the mainstream society that marginalizes minority groups (Baldwin 1985; hooks 1992). Relations of dominance in society are often reflected in the school culture, as mentioned earlier, valorizing the dominant group’s cultural arbitrary as the only legitimate knowledge to be taught (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977; Cummins 2001). Even when the minority language is taught, it often remains tokenistic, overriding overt support for the minority language and perpetuating the hierarchy between languages as well as their speakers (Meek and Messing 2007). It is not only the practice of education but also the wider sociocultural and educational environment in which the language skills are acknowledged and valued that support minority language education. In the 1990s, this approach to viewing minority issues as being really about the mainstream society led to the study of whiteness and dominant groups’ politics of invisibility, as research on race relations sought to understand the marginalization of minorities (Baldwin 1985; Doerr 2004; Frankenberg 1997; Roediger 1991, 1994; Spoonley 1991). However, it did not catch on in heritage language research. Existing research on social aspects of heritage language education tends to focus on heritage language learners (Krashen 1998; Wright and Taylor 1995). The mainstream context’s importance for heritage language education has been examined only tangentially, mainly in relation to ESL education (e.g., Wiley and Wright 2004). On the other hand, research that examines how the (lack of) cultural sensitivity in mainstream schools affects minority students’ self-esteem devotes little attention to how it also affects heritage language maintenance (Meek and Messing 2007; Niyozov and Pluim 2009; Valdés 1996). While this chapter does not investigate mainstream society’s reception of heritage language as whiteness studies proponents would urge, it does shed light on the influence of the mainstream social and educational context and how some students’ frame of reference can change toward the mainstream.

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7.3 Japanese language in US mainstream education In US history, Japanese has been a less visible minority language than others such as Spanish and German. This changed in the 2000s. In 2006, the National Security Language Initiative (NSLI) was established to increase the number of advanced-level speakers of non-English languages and especially “critical need” languages, identified as Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Russian.2 In conjunction with the NSLI, the Secretaries of State, Education, and Defense and the Director of National Intelligence allocated funding to expand critical foreign language education in the United States from kindergarten to postsecondary education and into the workforce. Although this “critical need” designation implied that these languages and the associated societies were targeted as security concerns – similar to the way some regions in the world became objects of study through the development of area studies in US higher education in the 1960s – rather than enjoying mere increased interest, it did create some positive effects for the minority communities in terms of increased attention, resource allocation, and the educational capital of the language. One such effect was that Japanese was made an AP examination subject in 20063, as mentioned in Chapter 3. While only College Board-certified schools can offer AP courses, students may take any AP examination without taking an official course at their high school. This led some weekend Japanese language schools to begin offering classes geared toward preparation for the AP Japanese exam. Thus, although the government policy of increasing the number of advancedlevel speakers of “critical need” languages aimed to do so mainly through mainstream schooling, this policy created opportunities to encourage students in community minority language schools to continue their language learning (for more discussion of the effects of US policies, see Doerr and Lee under review). Nonetheless, explicit recognition of knowledge of Japanese as educational capital remained restricted to the high school level. Therefore, even though the government policy aimed at mainstream education added to high school students’ incentive to learn Japanese at JJLS, lack of a similar structure at the middle school level led some students to leave JJLS, as we will show in this chapter.

7.4 Students’ and parents’ experiences In this section, we discuss the cases of three students, all of whom had attended JJLS since preschool. 2 http://www.thelanguageflagship.org/students-a-parents/critical-languages. Accessed 6 January 2012. 3 www.collegeboard.com. Accessed 6 January 2012.

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7.4.1 Mayumi: After taking AP examination, left JJLS right before graduation For Mayumi, the student introduced in Chapters 1 and 6, motivation to study at JJLS shifted from her mother being Japanese and communicating with extended family to a personal impetus focused on her sense of self, then to an educational motivation to leverage her knowledge in the mainstream educational context in the United States. Doerr conducted three interviews with Mayumi, and in this chapter we focus on the first, done on February 25, 2007, when she was a 6th grader, and the third, done on January 30, 2011, when she was a 10th grader, respectively, before and after Mayumi moved to the Jackson Course. We also introduce Lee’s interviews of Mayumi’s mother on June 10, 2007, and March 9, 2011. As described in detail in Chapter 6, Mayumi was an eijū student who was “half Japanese, half Russian”. She explained in her first interview what influenced her feeling of being half Japanese: “Parents [. . .] Japanese language school, definitely. And going to Japan. Having a kimono.” When asked what makes a person Japanese, she answered, “One of the parents is any portion Japanese,” then added, “I feel I am more Japanese [than Russian] because I speak it.” Mayumi explained that she had begun attending JJLS in preschool (the first stage) because her mother wanted her to be able to speak Japanese to her grandparents. Mayumi’s mother’s answer to the same question in her first interview was very similar: “Because I am Japanese, I wanted her to speak in Japanese with my family in Japan.” As to the second stage – late elementary to middle school – Mayumi stated in the first interview that she had come to enjoy learning about her “own culture” and wanted to be bilingual. Asked how JJLS had influenced her, she mentioned that it “gives me a sense of being Japanese”. Mayumi’s mother said in her first interview that at this stage, Mayumi “herself wants to study Japanese. She has begun to feel that it is cool to be bilingual. She has begun to feel proud of that.” Mayumi’s mother said that by coming to JJLS, Mayumi was learning Japanese culture and customs. “If she had not come to JJLS, she would not have felt she is Japanese this clearly.” At this stage, Mayumi’s mother encouraged Mayumi to join the Jackson Course because it would prepare her for AP Japanese. In her third interview, carried out while she was in the third stage – high school – Mayumi described her reason for studying Japanese as follows: I have been studying Japanese since I was three. So, I want to continue that. It’s also so that when I graduate from college, I can use it for my career. Also, for AP Japanese. I have the AP Japanese test in May. It’s once a year [. . .] When I was in elementary school and middle school, I studied Japanese because I wanted to talk to my grandma. My mom wanted me to talk to my grandma, too.

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Mayumi’s mother said in her second interview that she was still sending Mayumi to JJLS at this third stage because she wanted her to stick with it until she graduated from high school. But, she added, it had become very difficult to continue, as Mayumi was busy with schoolwork from her high school. Mayumi left JJLS in September 2011, having taken an AP Japanese examination in May 2011. Before Mayumi left, her teacher at JJLS told Lee that Mayumi had received the highest score on the AP Japanese exam. When Lee saw Mayumi on her last day of JJLS, she congratulated her on the excellent AP examination score and suggested that once Mayumi was done with her college application process she should come back to JJLS to graduate at the end of the academic year in March 2012. That way, she could receive the graduation certificate, a symbolic recognition of her Japanese schooling from JJLS – symbolic, because it was not officially recognized as school credit in either Japan or the United States. Mayumi did not answer, but her eyes filled with tears. Her mother, standing next to her, told Lee that she would be too busy at her high school. Mayumi’s case shows how her motivation to learn Japanese shifted through three stages. First, when she was in preschool and early elementary school (first stage), her mother wanted her to learn Japanese so that she could talk to her Japanese grandmother. It was also because Mrs. Michaels is Japanese. This was a family-related, practical communicative reason focused on the relationship with family in Japan. The frame of reference was that of Japan. Second, as a sixth grader (second stage; late elementary and middle school), the reason for coming to JJLS was to be Japanese-English bilingual and JapaneseAmerican bicultural. In other words, JJLS gave her a sense of being Japanese while living in the United States. This new frame of reference – that of the United States – contrasted with a Japanese frame of reference, in which one would not attend a Japanese language school like JJLS to become bilingual, but rather an English school. At this point Mayumi’s sense of self derived from linguistic proficiency and cultural competence: individual-focused Japaneseness. She was studying Japanese at JJLS mainly for personal reasons and no longer mentioned people she wanted to communicate with. Yet at the same time, a Japanese frame of reference still existed. As discussed in Chapter 6, around this time she joined the Jackson Course and came to view herself as a keishōgo learner in relation to “Japanese” students in hoshūkō-bu. Third, as a 10th grader (third stage; high school), Mayumi listed two reasons for attending JJLS: for the educational investment in her future in the United States (in terms of both college preparation, i.e., AP Japanese, and her career) and for sentimental value (to continue what she had been doing since she was three years old). The former suggests an eye to her position in American society

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(American frame of reference) with a special focus on education. Mayumi’s mother expressed the same point of view, with the difference that by the second stage her mother had already felt that JJLS would give Mayumi an educational advantage in getting into American colleges. Mayumi’s second reason, on the other hand, prioritized personal sentiment. Giving these two reasons for continuing to attend JJLS did not imply that they had replaced her valuing her sense of being Japanese and being a bilingual/bicultural individual. Rather, these latest reasons for attending JJLS built on her already being bilingual/bicultural by this time. The former of these two reasons gained force, however. Once she was done with the AP Japanese examination, Mayumi left JJLS without waiting for graduation. In light of Mayumi’s statement from her interview – that she wanted to finish off what she had begun at age three – the tears Lee saw on Mayumi’s last day at JJLS indicate the difficulty of balancing the sentimental value of a symbolic recognition with practical management of a busy daily schedule centered on the American mainstream educational system (American frame of reference). This contrasts with Anne’s case, which we will discuss later. Since the AP Japanese examination was initially designed for American high school students learning Japanese as a foreign language, AP Japanese exam takers would regard students like Mayumi as JHL learners, as opposed to JFL learners. That is, in aiming to take the AP Japanese exam, Mayumi was interpellated as a kind of heritage language learner different from keishōgo learners, who study Japanese as keishōgo (heritage language) in contrast to kokugo learners who study Japanese as their kokugo (national language) and thus their “native” language. Other students reported a similar trajectory of shifting reasons for attending JJLS. For example, April, who began attending JJLS in preschool and moved from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course in third grade, attended JJLS because of her parents’ desire that she learn Japanese (6th grade; second stage). However, this shifted to attending “for college credits [. . .] AP test” and to be with her friends (10th grade; third stage). Whereas the earlier reason does not refer to the American frame of reference, the later reason clearly does. Martin, who enrolled in the Jackson Course in 4th grade (the second stage) and whose case we discussed in Chapter 6, said the reason for attending then was his parents’ wish that he learn to read and write in Japanese. He also felt that coming to JJLS made him feel more “Japanese” (6th grade; second stage). But in the interview he gave in 10th grade (third stage), he explained his reason for attending JJLS differently: “Because my mother is Japanese, she advised me to study Japanese. And, because if I can speak two languages, it’s easier to find a job [. . .] I began thinking about the job after I entered high school.” His

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mother’s reasons for sending him to JJLS also shifted from wanting him to learn to read and write in Japanese, make Japanese-speaking friends, and boost his confidence (6th grade; second stage) to a focus on “excellent extracurricular activity for his resume”, his college application, and his career (10th grade; third stage). The frame of reference for Martin and his mother shifted from that of Japan to that of the United States. These cases differ from the case of Jake, who left JJLS when he finished 8th grade, as we describe next.

7.4.2 Jake: Left JJLS after 8th grade Jake began attending JJLS in preschool and stayed in hoshūkō-bu until he left JJLS in his 8th grade year. Jake’s reason to attend JJLS was unchanged throughout his years at JJLS and after he left: he wanted to make his mother happy because she was Japanese and spoke Japanese. Jake’s case contrasts with those of Mayumi and other students discussed in the previous section, as Jake saw personal benefit as the only advantage to studying Japanese at JJLS. Doerr interviewed Jake twice: once on March 4, 2007, when he was in 6th grade, and again after he left JJLS, on February 13, 2011, when he was in 10th grade. Doerr also interviewed Jake’s mother, Mrs. Jefferson, twice: on February 18, 2007, and on February 13, 2011. Jake and his mother came to JJLS for one day to do their second interviews. Jake had been one of the friendliest students to Doerr during her participant observation in class, although he was not very talkative in the classroom, where Japanese language predominated. When he talked casually to other students, he used English. When asked to identify himself ethnically in his first interview, Jake did not want to do so.4 Later in the interview, however, when asked what makes a person Japanese, Jake responded: “how they feel, I guess. If they think they were [. . .] Like I am Japanese but that’s because my mom is and she passes it down. So, it’s, like, I guess if your parents’ heritage is Japanese then you are included.” His Japanese mother had married an American, and they had lived in Japan for three years before his work brought them to the United States in 1991, his mother said in her interview. In his first interview, Jake accounted for the first and second stages by saying he attended JJLS “because it makes my mom happy”. He felt that the homework for JJLS was too much and would have preferred to play with friends on Sundays. Once he was at school, however, he said “it is not too bad”. 4 Jake’s mother said in her interview that she was Japanese and her husband was American.

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Mrs. Jefferson said in her first interview that she was sending Jake to JJLS because she was Japanese and her parents in Japan spoke only Japanese. This indicated a Japanese frame of reference. Jake had not wanted to move to the Jackson Course, where the students were mostly eijū. To the question whether or not he had thought about joining the Jackson Course, he said his mother had suggested he attend. However, he had decided against it because he felt it was “for people who, not that they don’t know it but, like, they don’t know, they can’t, they don’t learn as fast as kids in this [the hoshūkō-bu] class”. However, Jake seemed to have been alienated in hoshūkō-bu (for details, see Doerr and Lee 2010). Although Jake was positive about the diversity of students in the hoshūkō-bu class in his interview, Mrs. Jefferson reported otherwise in her first interview. When asked about the difference between Jake’s friends at JJLS and at the American school he attended, Mrs. Jefferson said that Jake complained at home that “Japanese kids” in JJLS interrupted their teacher with silly jokes to make others laugh. “Japanese kids” laughed at the jokes, but Jake did not get them; instead he complained that their behavior was annoying, rude to the teacher, and disruptive to learning, his mother said. Also, when asked the standard question of whether she had encouraged Jake to make more friends at JJLS than at his American school, Mrs. Jefferson replied obliquely that at JJLS, Jake seemed to be able to make friends only with children who were hāhu5 – mainly eijū students. In the past, there had been several verbal fights between “Japanese” and hāhu children in class, she said. They had had few fights recently, but there was still an invisible wall between them, which Jake resented, Mrs. Jefferson reported. In his second interview, Jake explained that he had left JJLS because the “homework load at American school was too much”. When he made the decision to leave JJLS, he was looking forward to “having Sunday off. More time to do my American school’s homework. Watch the Jets game”. At the same time, he was worried about “not being able to speak as well, not just to Mom but to other Japanese relatives and friends”. After he left, “Time management got worse. More time, but I’d think, ‘I’ll do it on Sunday,’” he laughed. In her second interview, Jake’s mother also said Jake had left JJLS because of “the increased amount of homework in American school and busy schedule of his sports. He could not finish homework and he needed Sundays to work on his homework. Also, because he will be going away for college, we wanted family time before he does.” She said she and her husband were looking forward to having more time with their son. But she also worried that Jake might forget Japanese. 5 The term hāhu derives from the English term, “half,” meaning the child is half Japanese and half non-Japanese due to his/her parents’ race.

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In his second interview, Jake recalled the impact the JJLS experience had had on him: “As a kid, it felt like it was a chore. It’s weekend, all day, and homework. Once I left, I felt that JJLS was important in helping me speak Japanese and it teaches you how important Japanese is to you. [Now] I use it [Japanese] every day with Mom and Dad. Basic [. . .] ‘What’s for dinner.’” In terms of his sense of self, JJLS “helped me feel unique and lucky to speak Japanese well”. At the end of the interview, he added, “As I got older, I realized that it is a great community.” The reason he wanted to speak Japanese was that “Mom is Japanese and she speaks it.” In her second interview, Mrs. Jefferson said she felt that the impact of JJLS on Jake was that “he became bilingual, although not perfectly. He should feel proud that he can speak a language other than English. He could also learn about Japanese culture, so that was good experience [. . .] It also made him open to other cultures.” In terms of his sense of self, she said, “he was always aware that he has half Japanese blood. But, if he hadn’t come to JJLS, he would have thought he is American but his mother is Japanese. By coming to JJLS, he felt he is half Japanese more.” In the first and second stage, Jake’s motivation for coming to JJLS was to make his mother happy. This involved family obligation, the search for affection, sharing the same language, and possibly gaining a sense of heritage. What we see here is mainly the Japanese frame of reference. However, Jake seemed to feel a sense of alienation from chūzai/chōki-taizai students, whom he reportedly considered “Japanese kids”: they had a different sense of humor and classroom behavior. This raises a question: If Jake was differentiating himself from “Japanese kids”, then what was Jake? Given the regimes of difference of chuzai/choki-taizai vs. eijū students that Jake evoked, viewing chūzai/chōki-taizai students as “Japanese” put eijū students, including Jake, in an ambiguous position: were they “American”? Yet Jake described himself as inheriting Japaneseness from his mother. Jake’s refusal to explicitly identify himself in terms of ethnicity suggests his resistance to this normative regime of difference of ethnicity, in which there was no place for eijū (hāhu) students. For Jake, then, though he was Japanese due to his mother, being in hoshūkōbu class made him feel alienated from the “Japanese”, represented by chūzai/ chōki-taizai students. Here, Jake cited two kinds of Japaneseness: individualfocused Japaneseness (heritage, identification) and community-focused Japaneseness (getting along with other “Japanese”). It was the schooling at JJLS that provided a space for this community-focused Japaneseness to come into play. After he left JJLS (third stage), he missed the ability to speak Japanese well and the sense of being different as a bilingual person, as well as the JJLS community. What he used here is an American frame of reference, viewing life in

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JJLS from American point of view as someone no longer attending JJLS. It is important that the loss of these benefits was felt only retrospectively, indicating that they were not strong enough to keep him at JJLS. Both Jake and Mrs. Jefferson mentioned a wish to have more free time. In particular, Mrs. Jefferson linked more free time to the enrichment of family life. Here the earlier link JJLS provided between JJLS and family life by enabling communication in Japanese was reversed as JJLS came to be viewed as something that robbed the family of time. Jake’s case contrasts with Mayumi’s in that he did not connect JJLS to the education in his mainstream American school. Jake did not take the AP Japanese examination. Instead, his schoolwork and socializing in the mainstream American school (American frame of reference) took priority over all the merits of JJLS (Japanese frame of reference). JJLS life and American life were not bridged as in Mayumi’s case. Had he stayed at JJLS, he would have had more opportunities to consider taking the AP Japanese exam and to figure out how to bridge the gap between his Japanese language study and mainstream American education. However, the Jackson Course program, which incorporates students’ bilingualism and thus would have made it easier for Jake to bridge the two schools, was not his choice. That is, by staying in hoshūkō-bu he refused to become anything other than a “Japanese” subject, although he felt alienated from the “Japanese kids” in it. Jake’s mother’s view was similar to Jake’s in that he attended JJLS because she was Japanese and wanted him to be able to communicate with her family in Japan. In her second interview, when Jake was in 10th grade, she mentioned the value of Japanese skills for him in terms of his being bilingual, knowing Japanese culture, being open to other cultures, having a sense of self as Japanese, and having Japanese friends. Here, we can see a shift in her also, as well as indirect mention of the American frame of reference. However, she did not state the value of Japanese language skills in the mainstream American education system. Some other hoshūkō-bu students (not counting those who moved away) left JJLS during or after 7th grade because of the stepped-up workload in their mainstream American school: one student in the 7th grade; two students in 8th grade; and two students in 9th grade.6 Anne, whom we will introduce next, was another student who left JJLS when she graduated from middle school, having decided not to attend the high school program. However, her case contrasts 6 One student left because of the workload as well as a scheduling conflict with his sport activities. We do not know why the others left because they did not participate in this research.

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with Jake’s because she connected her Japanese language studies to the mainstream American education system even though she left JJLS, which is quite uncommon but worth introducing here.

7.4.3 Anne: Left JJLS after middle school but took AP Japanese examination Anne, a case we introduced in Chapters 1 and 6, came to JJLS to study Japanese language and culture and learn to communicate with her grandmother. The former ambition continued in her second stage; an added reason was being different from her American friends. However, the workload in American school increased, so after the middle school program in hoshūkō-bu she stopped coming to JJLS and continued studying Japanese for the AP Japanese exam with her father’s help. Anne was an eijū student whose father was Japanese and mother was American: as Anne put it, she was a “mixture of Japanese and American”. Born and raised in the United States, Anne began her JJLS education in preschool. She attended hoshūkō-bu and left JJLS upon graduating middle school at the end of 9th grade. Doerr interviewed Anne twice: on March 18, 2007, when she was in 6th grade, and on March 14, 2010, her last day at JJLS at the end of 9th grade. Lee interviewed Anne’s parents twice, on March 18, 2007, and on February 28, 2010, a month before Anne left JJLS. Regarding the first and second stages, Anne said in her first interview (late elementary and middle school stage) that what she wanted from JJLS was to learn Japanese language and culture so that she could say “I can speak Japanese” and “I have two cultures”. She also wanted to talk with her grandmother in Japanese. As a student of hoshūkō-bu, Anne never thought about joining JJLS’s alternative Jackson Course program because she felt “It is a little too easy”. Anne’s parents said in their first interview that they had originally sent Anne to JJLS because they wanted her to be bilingual. Early in the second stage, Anne’s parents said in their first interview that they would leave it up to Anne to continue at JJLS. They did not encourage her to join the Jackson Course because they felt she could handle the MEXT Course of Study curriculum alongside chūzai. They also felt that this Japanese education would prove useful for Anne some time in the future. Although Anne’s father thought Anne would probably identify herself as American, coming to JJLS reminded her that she was also Japanese, he said. At the end of 9th grade, late in the second stage (late elementary and middle school), Anne said in her second interview that she had decided to leave JJLS that year because “the regular school became too difficult. A lot of homework

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and it just got too much.” In response to the interview question about the benefits of attending JJLS, she mentioned four advantages: (1) learning to speak Japanese; (2) doing something different from what her friends in the mainstream American school did; (3) learning Japanese culture; and (4) learning Japanese with other Japanese kids, which she saw as very different from learning Japanese as a foreign language in mainstream American school. As a negative thing about coming to JJLS, she mentioned that some teachers treated her and her fellow students differently. “Because I am not 100% Japanese”, she said, “some teachers used English to only me. That’s a bit prejudiced. Not much, but sometimes.” When asked if she was made to feel a minority in class, she answered, “Only sometimes” and explained that only four students in the entire class were born and raised in the United States (eijū) and only three, including herself, were “half Japanese”. However, nobody really talked about it and everyone was friendly to everyone else, she said.7 When asked about her plan for studying Japanese, she said: “I will be taking the AP Japanese exam, so I need to keep up with my Japanese.” She did not plan to study Japanese formally but would watch Japanese television and speak Japanese at home to keep it up, she added. She said she looked forward to going out on Sundays after leaving JJLS, but she worried about having to change the habit of going to JJLS every week and would miss it. She would also miss her friends there, she added. In answering the question about JJLS’s influence on her sense of self, she related an episode that took place when she was in 6th grade. At a YMCA camp she went to, a girl told her, “Oh, you are a half.” She did not mind this, but when she told her parents about the incident, they did. They told her she was not a half but “both” because she was both Japanese and American. At the time she had not understood what this meant, but now she understood it thanks to her experience at JJLS, she said. Now, whenever she has to check a box for her race on the SAT or other tests, she chooses “Other”, not “Asian” or “AsianCaucasian”, she said, because she is neither American nor Asian but both: “If I hadn’t come to JJLS, I wouldn’t know Japanese language and, when I see the box, I’d choose ‘American’ [. . .] Because I attended JJLS, I can speak to my family in Japan. That’s why I choose ‘other’.” In the interview a month before Anne left JJLS, Anne’s father said that Anne was planning to study for the AP Japanese exam with him at home. He was not 7 Eijū and chūzai students were divided in that the former viewed the latter as “Japanese”, as if they themselves were not. Occasions of open conflict decreased as students matured. However, as Anne’s comments show, teachers and students acted based on this categorization (for details see Doerr and Lee 2012, under review).

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worried about her Japanese skills deteriorating after she left JJLS. He said she enjoyed JJLS, especially school events, and had gained basic proficiency in Japanese by interacting with people in Japanese outside the home. However, the workload in her mainstream American school and her social life on weekends had pushed her to decide to leave JJLS. Because some students who were “half Japanese” had moved to the Jackson Course, he mentioned, Anne had become a minority in hoshūkō-bu, which made her feel that teachers treated her differently because she was not “pure” Japanese. In the first stage, Anne wanted to learn Japanese language and culture so that she could say she was “Japanese”, and to talk with her Japanese grandmother. That is, her sense of self and the practical need to communicate with extended family were the two main reasons. She did not want anything less than the Japanese education done in Japan. The frame of reference was that of Japan. This sense of self was the reason she did not join the Jackson Course, which she saw as a watered-down version of hoshūkō-bu, if not a lower-track hoshūkō-bu, as detailed in Chapter 6. It is worth noting here that Anne’s idea of what constitutes “knowing Japanese” (i.e., being able to follow the hoshūkō-bu curriculum) differed from Mayumi’s (i.e., obtaining knowledge at her own speed regardless of the hoshūkō-bu curriculum). Anne sought to be a “Japanese” subject. Ironically, however, Anne’s perception led her to leave JJLS altogether, because when her workload in the mainstream American school increased, she could not continue to carry out the workload in hoshūkō-bu. While in middle school (second stage), Anne saw the value of JJLS in learning Japanese language and culture, in the JJLS community, and in being different. She also mentioned the importance of JJLS to her sense of self: while her sense of being Japanese was important when she was in 6th grade, by the time she was in 9th grade she had come to a deeper understanding of what it meant to say she was “Japanese”. She was both Japanese and American. Her sense of self came from her language proficiency, indicating individual-focused rather than community-focused Japanese. The frame of reference was leaning toward that of the United States, finding the value of learning Japanese within a Japanese community in the American context. She prioritized her mainstream American school over the value she placed on JJLS: faced with a heavy workload in both schools, she chose the mainstream American school over JJLS. Here, JJLS was not viewed as useful in the American system, although she did see the Japanese language proficiency she had gained at JJLS as useful to her objective of taking the AP Japanese examination. Here, in the regime of difference that AP Japanese suggests, she was turned into a subject who was a learner of Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) as opposed to Japanese as a foreign language (JFL).

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Here she differed from Mayumi, who valued her continued attendance at JJLS because it was preparing her for AP Japanese. Anne’s case also contrasts with that of Jake, who also left during middle school but did not see Japanese language proficiency as advantageous in the US mainstream educational system. Anne’s case was rare in that she left JJLS but still used her Japanese skills in the mainstream American system.

7.5 Changing motivations and the mainstream education system The case of Mayumi and the briefly described cases of April and Martin show a common trajectory of motivation to attend JJLS. In the earliest, preschool and early elementary stage, their motivation was their practical need for communication with families in Japan. Their frame of reference was Japan. This earlier motivation may have continued to exist in later stages, although with different intensity. In the second stage during late elementary and middle school, the primary motivation became sense of self – being bilingual and being Japanese amongst Americans. They also viewed the knowledge they attained at JJLS as cultural capital in mainstream American life. Here, the new American frame of reference became important. If they continued to attend JJLS during the third stage, high school, they were motivated to gain both advantage from Japanese language skills as educational capital in the mainstream American education system and future career opportunities. The frame of reference was that of the United States. By the end of the second stage, sense of self and knowledge of Japanese as cultural capital alone were often insufficient incentive to continue attending JJLS, but seeing knowledge of Japanese as educational capital could tip the scale in favor of keeping on at JJLS. However, not all students stayed at JJLS long enough to perceive this link, as Jake’s case shows. Students like Mayumi, April, and Martin in high school (the third stage) perceived JJLS’s preparatory instruction for the AP Japanese examination as beneficial, as it allowed students to take an AP exam without taking the official high school AP courses. For the first time in their academic lives, the mainstream educational system was explicitly assigning value to learning Japanese, which helped motivate them to continue learning the language. These case studies imply that the lack of recognition of Japanese language proficiency as educational capital in the mainstream education system in middle school led some to leave JJLS. Had knowledge of Japanese been valued as main-

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stream educational capital at this stage, it could have given students additional incentive to stay at JJLS, as was the case at the high school level. As Jake’s case shows, once a student left JJLS it was difficult to keep up with Japanese language. Retaining these skills without going to JJLS might only have been possible when there was a clear goal to work toward, such as the AP Japanese exam in Anne’s case. These cases indicate that language policies that render knowledge of minority languages as educational capital in the mainstream educational system are crucial to inspiring learners of these languages to continue learning the languages. Inclusion of Japanese as an AP examination subject, as discussed in this chapter, is an example of such a policy. The cases of Jake and Anne, despite their similarities, show how learners forge different relationships with their study of Japanese. The two left JJLS for the same reason – the heavy workload at the mainstream American school. Both were in hoshūkō-bu and opted not to move to the Jackson Course when they began to struggle with the hoshūkō-bu workload. Both felt alienated in hoshūkō-bu to some degree (in terms of community-focused Japaneseness), although they had individual-focused Japaneseness through heritage via a parent (Jake) or linguistic proficiency (Anne). However, Jake did not view his Japanese language skills as a resource furthering his preparations for college, whereas Anne did. The contrast between Mayumi and Anne shows the different attitudes learners could have toward JJLS and Japanese. Both Mayumi and Anne intended to take the AP Japanese examination. Mayumi viewed JJLS as providing support toward that end; that she did not leave JJLS until she had taken the AP exam indicates this. Anne, however, did not link JJLS to the AP exam and sought instead to study for it at home with her father. Also, Mayumi moved from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course in 7th grade, whereas Anne stayed in hoshūkō-bu until she left. Mayumi was happy to be in the Jackson Course. Anne stayed in the hoshūkō-bu program based on the Japanese government’s guidelines and wished to be treated the same as chūzai students. Regardless of these differences, they both continued to study Japanese because of the AP Japanese exam, indicating the importance attached to knowing Japanese in the broader US mainstream education system. From this, we argue that by creating a sociocultural context that encourages heritage language maintenance, language policies at various levels of the mainstream American educational system play significant roles: federal language policies designate particular languages as critical for the nation; various organizations highlight the need to learn these languages by, for example, including them as AP subjects; and college policies allow students to receive college credit

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for AP achievement. Furthermore, we suggest a need for mainstream US schools to value Japanese language academically as educational capital at various critical stages, especially middle school.

7.6 Construction of subjects and two frames of reference JJLS and the AP Japanese examination turned individuals into subjects. In previous chapters, we described how individuals connected to Japanese language – mainly through their parents – were, from the school administrators’ viewpoints, constructed as keishōgo learners by attending the Jackson Course (Chapters 4 and 5), and from students’ and parents’ point of view, by negotiating their sense of self in their choice between joining hoshūkō-bu (“Japanese” students) or the Jackson Course (lower-track hoshūkō student or keishōgo learner) (Chapter 6). These subjects were produced via JJLS in the frame of reference of Japan, because the regime of difference in which they were produced focused on the subject’s relationship to “Japanese”. For example, subjects were produced in the regime of difference of “Japanese” vs. keishōgo learner, or that of “Japanese” vs. hāhu. During their time at JJLS, Mayumi, Jake, and Anne were produced as various types of subjects in terms of community-focused Japaneseness – as keishōgo learner (Mayumi), as someone not-so-Japanese (Jake), and as someone not 100% Japanese (Anne). The AP Japanese examination also made individuals into subjects. Originally designed for JFL speakers, the AP Japanese examination produced subjects by interpellating test-takers in the regime of difference of the Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) learner vs. the JFL learner. As the latter is usually an American, JHL learners in this case are defined in the frame of reference of the United States and include both “Japanese” students and keishōgo learners in a school like JJLS. Mayumi and Anne were interpellated as these subjects through taking the AP Japanese examination.8 As students moved from merely attending JJLS because their parents told them to, to attending for different purposes, their subjectivities changed also. Mayumi shifted from “Japanese” student attending hoshūkō-bu up to the end of 6th grade to keishōgo learner as opposed to “Japanese” students (Japanese frame of reference) when she moved to the Jackson Course in 7th grade. When 8 It is worth noting here that not all eijū students at JJSL wanted to take the AP Japanese examination. Some students told Lee that as “native” Japanese speakers, it felt like cheating to take the AP Japanese exam. Other students said they did not need to take the AP Japanese examination because they had enough merit toward college application without capitalizing on their Japanese language proficiency.

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she decided to take the AP Japanese examination, she also became a JHL learner in relation to JFL speakers (American frame of reference). She left JJLS once she was done with the AP Japanese examination and did not wait to graduate JJLS, implying a shift from a Japanese to an American frame of reference. Jake was made into a “Japanese” student by attending the hoshūkō-bu class, at least in the administrators’ eyes. However, he felt alienated from chūzai/ chōki-taizai students, whom he viewed as “Japanese kids”. Thus, the subject he was made into was neither entirely “Japanese” nor a keishōgo learner of the Jackson Course. When he left JJLS, however, he became not so much a subject. As he had no intention of taking the AP Japanese examination, Jake’s position became less apparent outside the community of Japanese language speakers at JJLS and it was unclear what his position was, other than someone who knew how to speak Japanese. Anne was produced as a “Japanese” student by attending hoshūkō-bu class, but she always recognized her own bilingualism and biculturalism. She was never a keishōgo learner, as she refused to join the Jackson Course, even though at times she felt alienated in hoshūkō-bu. However, when she decided to work toward AP Japanese examination, she became positioned as a JHL learner in relation to JFL learners. That is, she shifted from “Japanese” student to JHL learner in the American frame of reference.

7.7 The AP Japanese examination as interface In this context, the AP Japanese examination played a complex role. First, it was a sign of mainstream recognition of Japanese language proficiency as educational capital. It was acknowledgment of the value of knowing Japanese language. Second, because of the first role, the AP Japanese exam was a catalyst in moving JJLS students from the frame of reference of Japan to that of the United States. In the second stage, when students were juggling the workloads of both JJLS and their American schools, the AP Japanese exam’s potential to benefit their education in the United States was a strong reason for JJLS students to continue learning Japanese. Third, the AP Japanese exam pushed students and parents toward an American frame of reference. It produced subjects out of the students by positioning them in the regime of difference of JHL learner vs. JFL learner. Meanwhile, JJLS ended at the end of high school, indicating the end of a Japanese frame of reference for graduating students who resided in the United States. In contrast, the AP Japanese exam opened up the American frame of reference to students attending American high schools where it counted toward college credit.

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Fourth, and thus, the AP Japanese examination was a symbol of the American frame of reference. For Mayumi, who after finishing the AP Japanese exam left JJLS without waiting to graduate, the AP Japanese examination symbolized her moving on to an American frame of reference, away from the Japanese frame of reference that graduating JJLS symbolized. Her tears upon leaving JJLS seem to indicate a sentimental attitude toward this shift.

7.8 Conclusion In this chapter, we traced the trajectories of students’ shifting motivations to attend JJLS, investigating how the students were produced as subjects and how their frame of reference shifted in due course. Japanese’s status within the mainstream American educational system affected their motivation to continue their language study. Knowing Japanese language was cultural capital in the United States because connection to another culture and being bilingual/bicultural were valued in the United States, especially at the middle school stage. However, during the critical stage when the workload in American mainstream schools became heavy, Japanese proficiency also had to be translated into educational capital applicable to the AP examination, college applications, and future career prospects in order to motivate the students to continue attending JJLS. Ultimately, continuation of Japanese language studies at the high school level depended on the educational capital that knowledge of the language conferred in American mainstream schooling. This brought on a shift of frame of reference from that of Japan to that of the United States. In due course, students were made into various subjects through an individual- or community-focused criterion, in relation to “Japanese” students in the frame of reference of Japan, and in relation to American JFL learners in the frame of reference of the United States.

8 Adjusting the Jackson Course 8.1 Imagining and accommodating heritage language learners Chapters in this volume have examined how heritage language learners are not a type of students one can observe and identify “objectively” but a constructed notion defined relationally in particular contexts by researchers (Chapter 2), government officials (Chapter 4), school administrators (Chapters 4 and 5), students and parents (Chapters 6 and 7), and the mainstream schooling system (Chapter 7). Such constructions of who heritage language learners were affected the design and operation of the Jackson Course, as JJLS administrators sensed how these constructions influenced students’ decision to join the Jackson Course and motivations to study Japanese as well as justification of the presence of keishōgo education within JJLS. In this chapter, we show how the Jackson Course developed in response to these concerns. JJLS administrators attended to several practical concerns in ensuring the Jackson Course’s well-being within the school. They had to respond to students’ and parents’ perceptions and wishes, and aim to meet the needs of people living in the United States. The Jackson Course had to attract enough students to achieve financial viability, yet it also had to be selective in terms of linguistic proficiency to have a consistent curriculum and enable teachers to run classes smoothly. To operate the entire school with its several different programs, JJLS administrators needed to build good relationships with MEXT-assigned principals by ensuring their work was restricted to their job description and not burdening them with extra duties. To establish a niche, the Jackson Course had to emphasize its distinctions and differences from hoshūkō-bu in terms of curriculum, teacherstudent ratios, etc. In what follows, we focus on parents’ perceptions, the needs of students living in the United States, and relations with MEXT.

8.2 Responding to parents’ perceptions As described in Chapter 4, in the first year of the Jackson Course, Lee encountered three factors accounting for some eijū parents’ reluctance to transfer their children to the Jackson Course. They were: (1) the perception of the Jackson Course as an easy class for hoshūkō-bu dropouts; (2) the parents’ lack of understanding of their children as heritage language learners of Japanese; and (3) the sustainability of the Jackson Course.

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Addressing the first factor – parents’ concern about the academic level of the Jackson Course – efforts were made to show that since the route the Jackson Course used to teach Japanese differed from what the MEXT envisioned, comparing it to hoshūkō-bu would be like comparing apples and oranges. In these efforts, Lee emphasized that the Jackson Course did not follow the MEXT Course of Study but was creating its own curriculum to meet the needs of the students in the class. Lee deliberately avoided relying on any particular textbook that would measure the level of the Jackson Course by the MEXT yardstick. Instead, Lee and teachers created course packets, drawing on various reading materials chosen to match the cognitive level and CALP of the students. The course packets included readings from the grade-level MEXT-certified textbooks to show that the level of the Jackson Course was on par with hoshūkō-bu. In addition to the course packet, middle school students were required to buy MEXT-certified kokugo textbooks for 7th and 8th grades.1 That is, in creating teaching materials to cater to the specific needs of the students in the Jackson Course, the administrators remained aware of how the teaching materials indicated the course’s level to potential students’ parents. They thus made sure not to project an image of the Jackson Course as being “easier” than hoshūkō-bu. JJLS administrators also addressed parents’ concerns about the Jackson Course’s level by holding an annual information session in late January, before students submitted their registration forms, and encouraging parents and students to observe classes throughout the year. With the information session, administrators sought to eradicate the impression that the course was an “easy class” and to inform parents about the ways the curriculum and teaching methods were designed especially for Japanese-English bilingual children. Lee explained the Jackson Course’s relationship to the MEXT-prescribed Japanese system, telling parents that the program did not follow the MEXT Course of Study for kokugo because it was for children who did not plan to go through the Japanese education system in Japan. Several years after the Jackson Course began, Lee started to use the term keishōgo in the information session, explaining that the Jackson Course’s approach to Japanese instruction differed from that of kokugo, which was for children in Japan who were assumed to be Japanese monolinguals. The point was well taken by some parents: when the middle school program was added in April 2007, one parent commented, “they also use a MEXT-

1 These MEXT-certified textbooks and the ones used in hoshūkō-bu came from different publishers, however. As mentioned in Chapter 5, several publishers issue MEXT-certified textbooks. In Japan, each school district chooses the publisher. For all hoshūkō abroad, the Japan Overseas Educational Services chooses one textbook for each subject and sends them to schools.

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certified textbook for the 7th grade. It is not the level which is the issue. They take a different approach to the materials.” Lee also explained the notion of keishōgo to the JJLS teachers in various teachers’ meetings. Lee also assured parents that the medium of instruction was Japanese. When the program began in 2004, some parents said to Lee, “I wonder if they are teaching it in English.” Lee took time in the information sessions to assure them this was not the case. Another of Lee’s tasks in informing prospective parents was to demonstrate the level of the Jackson Course materials by verbally describing them and displaying them at the information session. One parent said, “I looked at the textbooks. They are challenging.” The second factor in parents’ reluctance to embrace the Jackson Course – the perception that keishōgo was for “Japanese-Americans”, not “Japanese” – changed over the course of the course’s development. For example, in early 2011, Lee received letters from parents of kindergarteners petitioning for a 1st grade Jackson Course class. As mentioned, prior to this time, it had only accepted students in 2nd grade or above with a minimum of 1st grade literacy (CALP) by the MEXT standard, as it would have been too great a challenge to teach lower-grade students both with and without literacy in the same class. In response to parental demand, however, the Jackson Course began a class for 1st graders only in April 2012. This class was not multi-grade, but the others remained so. This development indicated not only acceptance but also demand for the Jackson Course on the part of JJLS parents. Several factors contributed to this change, Lee believed. The information sessions discussed above played a role, but the most important factor was the Jackson Course students’ demonstrated success in learning Japanese language outside of kokugo education. Jackson Course students participated in all school activities, including a holiday play and a speech contest, and their performances were received very favorably. This living proof that the Jackson Course was, for some students, a viable option to kokugo education in hoshūkō-bu class played a crucial role in normalizing Jackson Course students and their role at JJLS. The third factor – parental concern over the possible lack of future classes, i.e., uncertainty that the Jackson Course would prove viable and develop as a full-fledged course – was resolved as the course evolved through the years. Chapter 3 detailed how, as its original students continued and new students joined, the Jackson Course added classes to accommodate their needs. The JJLS board agreed in 2004 that if five or more students were enrolled per class, adding another class the following year would be financially viable, and from then on enrollment met this requirement, increasing from seven students in the first year to forty-seven in April 2012. Thus, over eight years the Jackson Course

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became a comprehensive and financially viable keishōgo course for 1st to 12th graders. As the Jackson Course was gaining its legitimacy at JJLS, however, there emerged other concerns in the placement of students in the Jackson Course. Some parents with 4th grade children resisted their children’s placement in Level 2. Between 2004 and 2007, students in grades 2–4 were placed in Level 2 and grades 4–6 in Level 3, with 4th graders placed in one level or the other based on their maturity and CALP as determined by Lee and teachers. Some parents of 4th graders were not happy when their children were placed in Level 2, despite the educators’ determination that this placement would best serve these students’ needs. Indeed, parents of 4th graders often asked Lee not to place their children in Level 2 because they did not want to see their children in the same classroom as 2nd and 3rd grade students. This sometimes affected the timing of a student’s transfer from hoshūkō-bu to the Jackson Course: some parents waited until a child was in 5th grade to make the transfer, even when the student had difficulties in hoshūkō-bu, because a 5th grader was always placed in Level 3. Aware of these postponed transfers and believing it was crucial that students switched programs in a timely manner, Lee and the Jackson Course teachers decided to consider students’ CALP and maturity independently when grouping students and restructured the Jackson Course for the 2008–2009 academic year as described in Chapter 3. All students in grades 2–6 were placed in an elementarylevel program. Within the elementary level, students were grouped based on kanji proficiency for the first period, CALP for the second and third periods, and age for the fourth period of the day. Lee made the last class period a projectoriented lesson targeting age groups regardless of CALP, so that students with similar cognitive level and emotional maturity could study together. Parents consequently started viewing the elementary program of the Jackson Course as one program, not Level 2 for lower-grade students and Level 3 for higher-grade students. Financial constraints had dictated that the Jackson Course begin with just one multi-age class in 2004. However, as the course developed, Lee found the flexibility of multi-age classes appropriate for the Jackson Course. In hoshūkō-bu, where students were assigned to grades according to birth dates, they moved on to the next grade no matter what. Lee found this system detrimental, especially for heritage language learners. In the multiple-age class setting, students usually stayed in the same class for two or three years and moved up to the next level when they were ready. Jackson Course students underwent formal assessment upon moving to the middle and high school programs. Because the goal of this course was general attainment of CALP, Lee had to advise some students and

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their parents to find alternate ways to study Japanese in cases of a big gap between a student’s BICS and CALP. In short, JJLS administrators responded to parents’ perceptions of the Jackson Course by choosing textbooks and creating course packets, explicating the course in information sessions, and reorganizing the structure of the course. Lee took pains to eradicate the perception that the Jackson Course was an “easier course”, shifting the regime of difference distinguishing hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course from that of top- vs. lower-track class to that of kokugo vs. keishōgo education. The administrators also restructured the Jackson Course so that students were placed in classes appropriate to their CALP and maturity without parental involvement.

8.3 Responding to students’ lives in the United States While the above section illustrates the Jackson Course administrator’s response to parents’ perceptions, this section describes her proactive accommodation of the specific needs of Jackson Course students, who tended to be eijū students whose lives were centered on conditions in the United States. Lee and the Jackson Course teachers consciously strove to include topics and skills taught in US schools in the course work. In contrast to hoshūkō-bu, where the frame of reference was Japan’s school system, the Jackson Course sought to connect Japanese language education to students’ school life in the United States. In the classroom, for example, Jackson Course teachers incorporated current affairs presentations and let students compare depictions of historical events in Japanese and American textbooks. Institutionally, JJLS began offering a preparatory class for the AP Japanese examination in the 2010–2011 academic year, as described in Chapter 3 and discussed extensively in Chapter 7. Because a good score on an AP Japanese exam was believed to be advantageous to students seeking admission to college in the United States, offering an AP preparatory class was a way for JJLS to cater to students whose future was in the United States. The class was open to high school students who were planning or considering going to college in the United States, regardless of whether they studied in the Jackson Course.

8.4 Responding to the MEXT’s positions As mentioned in Chapter 3, in April 2004 JJLS started the academic year with a completely new structure comprising the hoshūkō part of the school, renamed hoshūkō-bu and headed by a MEXT-sent principal, and the rest of the programs

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in the school, named the second educational unit and headed by a local administrator, Lee. Under the school’s policy, a team of administrators from the entire school was assigned to solve problems whenever they arose. To integrate every student and parent into the whole JJSL community no matter which program they belonged to, the school established several activities involving all students, such as a field day, a holiday play for elementary school students, and a speech contest for middle and high school students. A parent association for the entire school supported these activities and regular school operations. Also, Lee and the MEXT-sent principal worked together to screen 1st grade students for the newly established Jackson Course, although Lee was responsible for overseeing curriculum development for the class. It was Lee’s firm belief that all the administrators had to be unified in accommodating diverse students’ needs. JJLS’s response to the MEXT’s request and the efforts of the new team of administrators positively affected the JJLS community. As discussed in Chapter 4, although the MEXT had told some of its principals in official meetings and conferences not to pay attention to matters beyond hoshūkō-bu, Lee’s interviews of MEXT-assigned principals indicate that they were supportive, in that they respected the goals and needs of the second unit, understanding JJLS as a community-based school rather than a transplanted Japanese school. Lee made extra effort to maintain good communication with MEXT-assigned principals and emphasize unity among the teachers. The recognition JJLS’s efforts gained among other weekend Japanese language schools in the United States is a reflection of this mutual support. JJLS has received many visitors, both practitioners and researchers, and requests on curriculum information. JJLS’s efforts to emphasize inclusion of all Japanese language learners – kokugo, keishōgo, and JFL – and to ensure the MEXT-sent principal was responsible only for kokugo education gained a certain amount of recognition from MEXT officials, who then sent a more seasoned teacher experienced in schools abroad to serve as the principal of hoshūkō-bu.

8.5 Implications JJLS administrators established the Jackson Course with consideration of its target students’ diverse level of proficiency in Japanese, various interests and experiences in the United States, bilingual proficiency in Japanese and English, diverse academic interests, and heritage other than Japanese. This chapter has described how the program developed further in response to parents’ perceptions, students’ needs, and the MEXT’s position.

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The details of the Jackson Course’s operation may appear specific to JJLS. However, the Jackson Course experiences we have examined through participant observation, interviews, and Lee’s recollections as a JJLS administrator offer some theoretical insights for the study of language and education in general, as well as practical suggestions of ways other language schools can cater to increasingly diverse student bodies. One theoretical implication emerges from the discussion in this chapter, which described how students’ and parents’ perceptions of heritage language learners and their needs influenced the design and operation of the Jackson Course, and vice versa. Contrary to the Althusserian notion of an individual being always already interpellated while feeling that he/she is the author of his/her actions, at JJLS we see individuals affecting the very regime of difference in which they are interpellated. In the next chapter, we discuss what our case study offers to the wider theoretical understanding of heritage language education, knowledge and power, and governmentality, as well as practical suggestions for heritage language schools.

9 Implications and departure 9.1 Construction of the heritage language learner In this volume, we have sought to illustrate how the heritage language learner was constructed through a process of contestation and negotiation at a weekend Japanese language school. Contrary to what current research suggests, the heritage language learner does not objectively exist; rather, the label “heritage language learner” is a focus around which individuals ponder, discuss, and (re)define who they are, relating themselves to others, school programs, wider linguistic communities, and imagined homelands. In due course, individuals cite regimes of difference performatively, materializing the regimes of difference and interpellating themselves and others into certain subject positions. The case of Japanese language illustrates this construction of the heritage language learner vividly, because although there exist two kinds of what can be theoretically considered heritage language education, only one is construed as heritage language (keishōgo) education at school. In this final chapter, we review the discussion leading to this main point of the volume – including the effects of research on heritage language education (Chapter 2), the implications of homeland policies regarding “native” and keishōgo learners abroad (Chapter 4), the workings of each program’s intended mode of governmentality (Chapter 5), the ways people interpreted the meaning of the Jackson Course and thereby also what it meant to be a keishōgo learner (Chapter 6), and the effects of the mainstream American education system in sustaining construction of the heritage language learner subject but in a new way, shifting its meaning from not “native speaker of Japanese” to not JFL learner – and synthesize our arguments. We then discuss two types of practical implications of this volume: the implications of involving a linguistically trained school administrator (Lee) in an ethnographic research designed by a cultural anthropologist (Doerr), and the implications of our findings for the operation of schools like JJLS that teach Japanese as well as bilingual community schools that teach other languages.

9.2 Theoretical implications In Chapter 2, we illustrated how researchers and school administrators construct the heritage language learner through categorization, contestation, and scrutiny of who “heritage language learners” are. In due course, reified notions of language, linguistic community, and language speakers are reproduced. In the

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case of Japanese hoshūkō, such categorization, contestation, and scrutiny go beyond each school because of the homeland government’s policies for allocating financial support, as shown in Chapter 4. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of knowledge and power, we analyzed this process as the perpetuation of power relations between those who seek to gain and manage knowledge about heritage language learners, and heritage language learners themselves, who become objects of knowledge. This produced the “heritage language effect” of performatively constructing the subject as a “heritage language” learner with particular consequences. However, we showed in Chapter 6 that assumed heritage language learners are not passive objects of knowledge but active participants in deciding what a heritage language learner is and whether to become one, to a degree that, as shown in Chapter 8, affects the operation of a school. In Chapter 4, we discussed how the notion of heritage language learners was constructed in opposition to the notion of “Japanese” students in terms of deserving Japan’s tax money for their education. This was apparent in the Japanese government’s reluctance to cater to increasing numbers of students who did not have concrete plans to live in Japan in the near future. This reluctance prevailed, despite policy changes in Japan promoting outreach to the local community, which would include such students. It was left to local administrators to respond to the needs of such students in line with JJLS’s founding philosophy of service to the local community. This resulted in struggles to define whom JJLS was supposed to serve and negotiation of the distinctions between “Japanese” students, who were to be served by the Japanese government, and keishōgo learners of Japanese, who were not. Chapter 5 showed two ways heritage language learners were constructed at school through various technologies of government that aim to shape students’ behavior and subjectivities. We drew on Dean’s reformulation of Foucault’s notion of governmentality and showed how the notion of governmentality can be used to analyze micro-level practices. Modes of governmentality, deployed differently in hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course, index JJLS administrators’ respective imaginings of who kokugo learners and keishōgo learners are, and what they need and want. We analyzed classroom designs and practices in terms of (1) visualization of who and what were to be governed, (2) techniques through which students were governed, (3) knowledge that arises from and informs the act of governing, and (4) subjectivities produced by the act of governing. However, as Chapter 6 described, some students and parents interpreted the modes of governmentality in ways that differed from the administrators’ intent. In their perceptions of hoshūkō-bu and the Jackson Course, many wavered between two regimes of difference – top- vs. lower-track classes, and kokugo vs. keishōgo education – when comparing the two programs. These perceptions

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influenced students’ and parents’ decisions to join, stay, or leave the Jackson Course, producing the “heritage language effect”. We then stressed the importance of these perceptions in analysis of the effects of the mode of governmentality. Such differences in interpreting modes of governmentality have previously received little scholarly attention because the existing modes of governmentality and their effects are usually determined by the researchers themselves. Chapter 7 shifted the lens to a longer time span and investigated why individuals came to and continued to put themselves in the position of being constructed as heritage language learners by attending JJLS. We traced students’ changing motivations for attending JJLS over three stages and examined their changing frames of reference, pointing out the role mainstream American education system played in keeping some students at JJLS and constructing them as a different kind of heritage language learner: the Japanese-as-a-heritagelanguage (JHL) learner. In that process, the meaning of the heritage language learner subjectivity changed, as did the regime of difference they used, which shifted from a Japanese frame of reference (Japanese vs. heritage language learner of Japanese/keishōgo learner) to an American frame of reference (JHL learner vs. JFL learner). Chapter 8 showed how students’ and parents’ perceptions of the keishōgo learner, whom the Jackson Course was supposed to cater to, influenced its design and operation and, vice versa, refined the notion of keishōgo learner in the process. Unlike the Althusserian notion of an individual being interpellated inescapably while feeling that he/she is the author of his/her action, what we saw at JJLS indicated individuals’ actions indirectly affecting the very regime of difference through which they get interpellated. This mutual formation of both a keishōgo program and the students’ and parents’ perception of it leads us to practical implications of this volume in two veins: the effects of involving an administrator in research on school, and the implications of the research findings.

9.3 Practical implications of administrator involvement in research As mentioned, this research is a collaboration between a cultural anthropologist (Doerr) and a school administrator who is also a linguist (Lee). In this section, we refer to Lee’s reflections to discuss the practical effects of such collaboration. Lee notes two effects. First, the collaborative process involved becoming more familiar with existing research on heritage language education in general, which allowed Lee to see a bigger picture in which to situate her experience as administrator of the

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Jackson Course. It gave her assurance as well as new insight and understanding about what she did daily. The Jackson Course approach that Lee helped develop is an innovative one in the context of Japanese language education in US hoshūkō. As we have illustrated, the type of education practiced in hoshūkō was the only education most parents, teachers, and administrators at JJLS were familiar with. Few of them were aware of the notion of keishōgo/heritage language, which itself was still a new concept in the United States at the time the Jackson Course was designed. Therefore, even though some administrators and teachers acknowledged that teaching Japanese to children born and raised in the United States might require a different approach from what was offered in hoshūkō-bu (i.e., the kokugo education designed for children in Japan), there was no consensus about what that approach should look like. This lack of precedence led to trial and error in the operation of the Jackson Course and an uphill climb to gain legitimacy for the Jackson Course. In this context, familiarity with academic research on heritage language education that supported her practices and beliefs gave Lee confidence in her operation of the Jackson Course, as well as information and a sense of legitimacy to bolster her explanations of curricula and teaching methods to the school community. Meanwhile, knowledge about academic literature on heritage language education provided Lee with frameworks for understanding the practices of students and parents at JJLS. For example, Lee had noticed that some parents, having initially sent their children to the school to gain “native-like” proficiency in Japanese language, noted their children’s response to schooling and changed their goal for the children to being part of a community of students familiar with Japanese language without seeking high linguistic proficiency. Lee had always believed the school should create room for all students, including those who did not seek to achieve high proficiency and would feel overwhelmed studying Japanese with chūzai and chōki-taizai students in a classroom designed for them. Academic literature, such as research discussing the notion of “language shyness” (Krashen 1998), gave Lee a theoretical framework for understanding why such a change occurs and confirmed her belief in the need to create a program for eijū students. It also allowed Lee to discern that the reason some students continued to study Japanese had to do with their self-esteem as people of Japanese heritage in the United States. Second, Lee’s collaboration in the ethnographic research involved conducting interviews and reading the interview results, which gave her in-depth understanding of how diversely students and parents view their Japanese language education. For example, Lee used to disagree with decisions some students and

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parents made about which of the two programs to join, as she felt the other program would improve the student’s linguistic ability more efficiently. However, upon learning various reasons why students and parents choose a program, Lee came to realize that some people choose a given program for reasons other than linguistic needs, such as the sense of who they are. This understanding had a practical implication for the operation of the school. The new respect Lee gained for the decisions students and parents make in choosing programs led her to reject a linguistic proficiency-centered approach to students’ placement. She thus refused to conduct tests to track students and assign them to particular classes, even when some parents and teachers suggested she do so. Another revelation from the interviews – that some students and parents resisted joining the Jackson Course because they saw it as a class for dropouts – also discouraged Lee from testing students to determine the class they should join. The fact that students were not assigned to the Jackson Course based on proficiency tests made the Jackson Course look less like a lower-track class and more like a program designed specifically for Japanese language learners without plans to live in Japan in the near future. This reflection by Lee points to the importance of school administrators’ familiarizing themselves with academic literature on heritage language education and conducting surveys and interviews to find out why students and parents choose particular programs. As we encourage practitioners to be aware of and familiar with academic research, we also encourage researchers to reach out to practitioners. Researchers, who always benefit from fieldwork at these schools, have a responsibility to share their findings with practitioners and their school communities so that the research can benefit heritage language students in practice. Collaboration between a researcher and a practitioner is one way to accomplish this. These points and findings of our study prompt the suggestions for school operation in the following section.

9.4 Suggestions following from this study’s findings This collaborative study and Lee’s experience of it point to the following six practical suggestions for school administrators, teachers, and parents. The first suggestion for practitioners – both administrators and teachers – is to refrain from automatically imposing the label heritage language learner on students or assigning the label heritage language to a program, and instead to grasp the specific needs and perceptions of the particular school community in question.

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As this volume’s main argument suggests, heritage language learner is not an objective and unchanging label but a subjective positioning contextually carried out at the intersections of various regimes of difference. Also, as Chapter 6 showed, two different students can perceive the very same class quite differently. Moreover, their perceptions can also differ greatly from the practitioners’ intentions. Understanding this can help administrators make sense of both the dynamics of student enrollment and the resistance to, or support for, programs designed for heritage language learners. We thus suggest practitioners – both administrators and teachers – make every effort to understand why students wish to learn the language, why their parents want them to, and how both students and parents perceive school programs. As Chapter 7 illustrated, program designs and pedagogies can be more effective when practitioners are aware of the diverse motivations and relationships a student may have with the language: minority language speaker in mainstream society, less proficient speaker of the language in comparison to “native speakers”, or grandchild who wants to communicate with grandparents, to name a few. Practitioners who are more aware of students’ non-linguistic motivations are more likely to countenance students’ program choices – which may seem inappropriate, judging by linguistic proficiency alone – as long as these choices do not interfere with class operation. To build this awareness, practitioners can carry out surveys of parents’ and students’ views of school programs or interview them in depth when they are choosing a school program. Regular parent-teacher or parent-administrator conferences to discuss aspirations and needs can also be helpful. Second, from our understanding of the trajectory of the development of the Jackson Course at JJLS, we suggest a holistic approach to creating programs suited to each school. That is, the school’s size, student body, and geographical location need to be considered in the design and operation of a school program. In schools like JJLS, where there is a mixture of chūzai, chōki-taizai, and eijū students, administrators need to be flexible about adopting various approaches. That is, we suggest that administrators stay in close communication with teachers and parents, and be open to using diverse pedagogies rather than insisting on the MEXT curriculum. In schools in areas where students are mostly chūzai who are expected to return to Japan soon, the hoshūkō approach that follows the MEXT curriculum may work the best. In this kind of situation, it is often the case that the local Japanese businesses that employ the chūzai students’ parents are deeply involved in the school’s operation. Their main concern is thus to maintain their employees’ children’s Japanese education to enable their smooth return to Japan. However, when schools are small in size, their only way to survive is to be approved as hoshūkō, which allows them to receive textbooks and financial

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support from the Japanese government. In such small schools, it may not be realistic to have a class separate from hoshūkō. Offering a class period with a specific purpose – such as a period to prepare students for the AP Japanese examination – may be a small school’s first step to cater eijū students. A similar class focused on kanji acquisition, usually measured by the MEXT’s yardstick, may give eijū students a space separate from chūzai students in which to resolve “language shyness”. When the school is so small that it has to have a multigrade class in which one teacher teaches two different grades in the same classroom, the teacher often has to provide differentiated instruction, such as assigning students worksheets to do by themselves while the teacher goes over materials with students in other levels or grades. Parents tend to prefer that the teachers give grade-specific or proficiency-specific instruction to the children, and it is usually difficult to persuade parents that all the students in close grades can benefit by doing some academic activities together. Small schools can take advantage of a high teacher-student ratio to teach the MEXT curriculum while implementing independently designed material in a more or less individualized way. They can also devote a portion of school hours to activities involving different grades and diverse proficiencies, such as group discussions and debates; reach out to other schools that offer multi-grade curriculum; and inform parents of the benefits of these group activities, particularly in the sphere of language development. Third, we suggest that school administrators and teachers have some knowledge of current research findings. As the previous section explained, knowledge of current research allows them to situate issues at hand in wider trends in language education, which may provide deeper understanding as well as possible solutions to the problems they face. Familiarity with existing research also helps practitioners see the wider implications of everyday actions and decisions, including their effects on students and their communities. Existing research can also spark new ideas for carrying out curricula. We understand that not all teachers have time to read, or are interested in and comfortable with reading research on heritage language education. The parents who run most weekend Japanese language schools in a spirit of volunteerism are not necessarily specialists in running a school or teaching. However, they can become familiar with existing research in several ways. One way is to be active in networks among schools. The MEXT and MFA in Japan encourage networking among hoshūkō via Japanese consulates in the United States. The Japanese consulates sponsor regional annual workshops for teachers of hoshūkō in the North America to show administrators ways to implement the kokugo curriculum outside Japan. Although they do not officially address keishōgo education, these workshops are occasions for exchanges of

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information among teachers. This interaction is becoming ever more helpful because teachers increasingly share concerns about diversity in students’ Japanese language proficiency and the difficulties of carrying out the kokugo curriculum to teach diverse students. Through this network, teachers can form various study groups or workshops that can be led by those who are actively involved in academic research. Such networking can also develop within a school. For example, meetings separate from regular faculty meetings can be held for administrators and teachers to discuss concerns from their teaching practices. Administrators and teachers who are familiar with the field can connect others to ideas in the existing literature. From her experience of running such meetings, Lee recalls that when teachers realized their approaches and/or concerns were not unique to their situation but present in other language instruction, they felt relieved and reassured. Fourth, practitioners can inform the school community about the pedagogical approaches they are taking and why. They can explain to parents that children’s processes of acquiring a language differ depending on the context in which they learn it, focusing on the fact that children living in the United States learn Japanese differently from Japanese children learning Japanese in Japan. Parents need to be aware that their children are not in a Japanese monolingual environment. They are surrounded by English most of the time, so their exposure to Japanese language is limited, regardless of their status in the United States in terms of being chūzai, chōki-taizai, or eijū. Practitioners have a responsibility to inform parents about the conscious efforts they can make to further their children’s language learning. The contrasting cases of Mayumi and Junko, discussed in Chapter 6, show how parents’ perceptions can affect students’ learning opportunities. Lee often encountered cases in which language learners felt confused because they lacked understanding and knowledge of such issues. Well-informed parents can support their children, and practitioners can help inform them about ways to do so. In relation to this, school administrators and teachers can inform parents of the value of Japanese language proficiency in the mainstream American education system and the possibility of the school offering classes to teach Japanese in line with this system, such as a course to prepare students for the AP Japanese examination. AP Japanese, as discussed in Chapter 7, is one major way to translate Japanese language skills into educational capital in the American education system. It enhances students’ chances of acceptance into US colleges and can also count toward college credit. Because AP Japanese is designed for American students who are learning Japanese as a foreign language, the form of the test may differ from the tests of Japanese proficiency that students in Japanese

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language school are used to. For example, they may be unfamiliar with the English words used to describe Japanese grammar. For this reason, it is important to acquire test-taking technique alongside knowledge of language. School administrators and teachers can offer a specialized class and explain the need for such instruction. Bridging Japanese language education and the mainstream American education system can also help Japanese language schools retain students, as described in Chapter 7. Fifth, we suggest that parents use information provided by the school and maintain close communication and observation to understand how their children perceive themselves as Japanese language learners. As discussed in Chapter 6, two students in the same environment can have different perceptions about themselves. Jake’s case, described in Chapter 7, shows that students develop subjectivities in relation to peers in and out of class. Parents can develop sensitivity to their children’s emotional and educational needs through constant communication. They can attend meetings that practitioners organize to provide information on those issues. We also advise parents to be flexible about the way their children learn Japanese language. Their own ideas or the model of their own experience in Japan – often kokugo education – may not be appropriate for their children. Parental encouragement and support is consequential to children’s healthy relationship with the language. Sixth, it is important to create an environment in which administrators, teachers, and parents are willing to support one another in cultivating children who are well adjusted in the language school and wider world. Given the competing interests and diverse wishes and aspirations among administrators, teachers, parents, and students, conscious effort is needed to create a supportive environment, as Chapter 4 suggests. Furthermore, as seen in Chapter 7, students and parents benefit from seeing the Japanese language beyond their own language community and connecting it to what is valued in mainstream society. Indeed, this is crucial in motivating students to continue their language study. The suggestions detailed above, based on our research at JJLS, are primarily for Japanese weekend language schools including hoshūkō. However, our suggestions can also apply to other, similar types of schools, such as bilingual community education schools (García, Zakharia, and Otcu 2013). Refraining from automatically labeling students heritage language learners (first suggestion), taking a holistic approach to creating programs to meet diverse needs of students (second suggestion), encouraging school administrators’ and teachers’ familiarity with academic research (third suggestion), informing the school community about pedagogic approaches and the rationales behind them (fourth suggestion), understanding one’s child’s sense of self as a language learner (fifth suggestion), and creating an environment of unity among administrators, teachers,

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parents, and students (sixth suggestion) are all, we argue, relevant to community language education for any language.

9.5 Heritage as a new imagining This volume has examined the ways in which the heritage language learner is constructed by (1) researchers who identify heritage language learners and seek knowledge about them; (2) government officials, school administrators, and teachers who design programs and mold behavior, desires, and available subject positions for heritage language learners in the classroom; and (3) students and parents who negotiate and contest the newly available subject position of heritage language learner in light of what they view as legitimate “Japanese language”, their relationship to Japan as the (ancestral) homeland, their aspirations, their family background, their linguistic proficiency in Japanese, and their position in classroom. The heritage language learner, then, is a new object of investigation, a target of new language education programs, and a new subject position. As the Jackson Course continues to evolve in response to students’ and parents’ demands, we expect new configurations and understandings, new regimes of difference, and new “heritage language effects” to emerge. García, Zakharia, and Otcu (2013) have pointed out the increasing number of similar types of community-centered language schools, to which our findings and suggestions can apply. Moreover, as a study of construction of the heritage language learner, this volume contributes an understanding of how a new field of research, new schooling practices, and their perceptions in daily life construct new subjectivities, which become not only an object of study but also something constantly inviting intervention. Contrary to the sense of looking to the past that the term “heritage” connotes, heritage language learner is a notion that begets new subjectivities as well as new ways to relate to languages, pushing forth into a future of diverse “languagings” and imaginings.

Appendix 1. First Questionnaires1 for Parents 1. Personal background: 1-a. Please describe your family members (age, gender, etc.). 1-b. Where were you born? 1-c. Where have you lived in the past? 1-d. Where was your child born? 1-e. What is the name of the school your child attends during the week? 2. About your life in the United States: 2-a. When did you come to the United States? 2-b. Why did you come to the United States? 2-c. Did you expect that you would come to the United States when you/ your spouse started your/his/her job in Japan? 2-d. Do you plan to live in the United States permanently, or move somewhere else in the future? If so, when? Where? 2-e. What things were you excited about in coming to the United States? 2-f. What things were you anxious about in coming to the United States? 2-g. How often do you go back to Japan? Does your child attend a school in Japan when you go back? 3. About JJLS: 3-a. Have you thought about sending your child to a full-time Japanese school? If yes, why? What made you decide against it in the end? 3-b. Why did you decide to send your child to JJLS? When did you start sending your child to JJLS? 3-c. Why do you still send your child to JJLS? (What do you want from JJLS for your child?) 3-d. What are the differences between regular American schools and JJLS, besides the languages used? 3-e. How do you think JJLS influences your child regarding his/her identity, language maintenance, friends, etc.? 3-f. How do you think JJLS influences you and your spouse? 3-g. What do you think is the role of the Parents Association at JJLS? 3-h. Is there anything you want JJLS to change? 4. About your child’s experiences at JJLS: 4-a. What are the positive classroom experiences for your child at JJLS? 1 The questions were asked in Japanese or English depending on the interviewees’ preferences.

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4-b. What are the negative classroom experiences for your child at JJLS? 4-c. What do you think about the diverse student body in the classroom? 4-d. Regarding how teachers handle the diversity, is there anything you feel they should continue/change? 4-e. Have you thought about sending your child to the Jackson Course? Why/Why not? 4-f. What is your image of the Jackson Course? 4-g. Have your images of the Jackson Course changed over time? 4-h. What do you think about the use of English in class by teachers? 4-i. What do you think about the use of English in class by students? 5. About your child’s social life: 5-a. Does your child socialize with friends mainly from his/her regular American school, or with those from JJLS? 5-b. What are the differences/similarities between your child’s friends from the regular school and those from JJLS? 5-c. Do you prefer the friends your child makes at one or the other school? 6. About standard and nonstandard Japanese language: 6-a. Do you speak a dialect of Japanese language? If yes: 6-a-a. Do you speak it to family members at home? 6-a-b. Do you want your child to be able to communicate in your dialect? 6-a-c. Do you want your child to feel free to speak his/her dialect at JJLS? 6-a-d. Do you want JJLS to teach only standard Japanese? Why/Why not? 6-b. In your opinion, how should JJLS treat nonstandard varieties of Japanese language? Why? 6-c. Have you ever been unable to understand a dialect different from your own? If yes, what did you do? 6-d. Has anyone ever been unable to understand your dialect? If yes, what did you do? 7. Identity/What makes a person Japanese: 7-a. What is your identity? 7-b. What do you think your spouse’s identity is? 7-c. What do you think your child’s identity is? 7-d. In your opinion, what has influenced you most in forming your identity? 7-e. In your opinion, what has influenced your child most in forming his/her identity?

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7-f.

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Do you think JJLS has influenced your identity formation? If yes, how so? 7-g. Do you think JJLS has influenced your child’s identity formation? If yes, how so? 7-h. Do you think living in the United States has influenced your identity formation? If yes, how so? 7-i. Do you think living in the United States has influenced your child’s identity formation? If yes, how so? 7-j. In your opinion, what makes a person Japanese?

Any other comments?

Appendix 2. Second Questionnaires for Parents 1. Personal background: 1-a. What is the name of the school your child attends during the week? 1-b. What are your plans for the near future? 2. About JJLS: 2-a. Why do you have your child study Japanese? Has your reason changed since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 2-b. Why do you continue to send your child to JJLS? Has your reason changed since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 2-c. Does your child study Japanese in addition to studying at JJLS? Has this change since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 2-d. What are the differences between regular American schools and JJLS, besides the languages used? Has your opinion changed since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 2-e. How do you think JJLS influences your child’s identity, language maintenance, friends, etc.? Has your opinion changed since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 2-f. How do you think JJLS influences your spouse? Has your opinion changed since your child was in the elementary/middle/high school? 2-g. Is there anything you want JJLS to change? 3. About your child’s social life: 3-a. Does your child socialize mainly with friends from the regular American school, or with those from JJLS? Is your answer the same as before? 3-b. What are the differences/similarities between your child’s friends from the regular school and those from JJLS? Is your answer the same as before? 3-c. Do you prefer your child to socialize with friends from one school to another? Is your answer the same as before? 3-d. Does your child keep in touch with friends who have left JJLS? 4. About your child’s experiences at JJLS: 4-a. What are the positive classroom experiences for your child at JJLS? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 4-b. What are the negative classroom experiences for your child at JJLS? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/middle/ high school?

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4-c. What do you think about the diverse student body in the classroom? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/middle/ high school? 4-d. Regarding teachers’ handling of the diversity, is there anything you feel they should continue/change? 5. About standard and nonstandard Japanese language: 5-a. Do you speak a dialect of Japanese language? If yes: 5-a-a. Do you speak it to family members at home? 5-a-b. Do you want your children to be able to communicate in your dialect? 5-a-c. Do you want your child to feel free to speak your dialect at JJLS? 5-a-d. Do you want JJLS to teach only standard Japanese? Why/Why not? 5-b. In your opinion, how should JJLS treat nonstandard varieties of Japanese language? Why? 5-c. Have you ever been unable to understand a dialect different from your own? If yes, what did you do? 5-d. Has anyone ever been unable to understand your dialect? If yes, what did you do? 6. Identity/What makes a person Japanese: 6-a. What is your identity? 6-b. What do you think your spouse’s identity is? 6-c. What do you think your child’s identity is? 6-d. In your opinion, what has influenced you most in forming your identity? 6-e. In your opinion, what has influenced your child most in forming his/her identity? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 6-f. Do you think JJLS has influenced your identity formation? If yes, how so? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/ middle/high school? 6-g. Do you think JJLS has influenced your child’s identity formation? If yes, how so? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/ middle/high school? 6-h. Do you think living in the United States has influenced your identity formation? If yes, how so? 6-i. Do you think living in the United States has influenced your child’s identity formation? If yes, how so? 6-j. In your opinion, what makes a person Japanese?

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7. About the Jackson Course (only for parents of students in hoshūkō-bu): 7-a. Have you thought about sending your child to the Jackson Course? Why or Why not? 7-b. What image do you have of the Jackson Course? 7-c. Have the image you have of the Jackson Course changed over time? 8. About hoshūkō-bu (only for parents of students in Jackson Course): 8-a. Have you thought about sending your child to hoshūkō-bu? Why/Why not? 8-b. What image do you have of hoshūkō-bu? 8-c. Have the image you have of hoshūkō-bu changed over time? 9. About visiting Japan: 9-a. How often do you go back to Japan? How long do you usually stay? 9-b. What does your child enjoy most when he/she is in Japan? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/middle/high school? 9-c. Does your child encounter any difficulties when he/she is in Japan? Has your answer changed since your child was in elementary/middle/ high school? 9-d. Does your child attend school when in Japan? Any other comments?

Appendix 3. First Questionnaires for Students 1. Personal background: 1-a. Please describe your family members (age, gender, etc.). 1-b. Where were you born? 1-c. Where have you lived in the past? 1-d. What is the name of school you attend during the week? 2. About your life in the United States: 2-a. When did you come to the United States? 2-b. Why did you come to the United States? 2-c. Do you plan to live in the United States permanently or move somewhere else? If so, when? Where? 2-e. What things were you excited about in coming to the United States? 2-f. What things were you anxious about in coming to the United States? 2-g. How often do you go back to Japan? Do you attend a school in Japan when you go back? 3. About JJLS: 3-a. Have you ever thought about attending a full-time Japanese school? If yes, why? What made you decide against it? 3-b. Why did you decide to attend JJLS? When did you start attending JJLS? 3-c. What do you expect to gain from JJLS? 3-d. What are the differences between regular American schools and JJLS, besides the languages used? 3-e. How do you think JJLS influences your identity, language maintenance, friends, etc.? 3-f. Is there anything you want JJLS to change? 4. About your experiences at JJLS: 4-a. What do you enjoy about JJLS? 4-b. What do you dislike about JJLS? 4-c. What do you think about the diverse student body in the classroom? 4-d. Regarding teachers’ handling of the diversity, is there anything you feel they should continue/change? 4-e. In what situations is English used in class? 4-f. What does your teacher do when students speak English in class? 4-g. Does your teacher sometime use English in class? If yes, in what situations? How do you feel about it? 4-h. Have you thought about attending the Jackson Course? Why/Why not? 4-i. What images do you have of the Jackson Course?

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4-j. Have the images you had of the Jackson Course changed over time? 4-k. What do you think about the use of English in class by teachers? 4-l. What do you think about the use of English in class by students? 5. About your social life: 5-a. Do you socialize mainly with friends from your regular American school, or with those from JJLS? 5-b. What are the differences/similarities between your friends from the regular school and from JJLS? 5-c. Have your parents ever encouraged you to socialize more with either your friends from the regular school or those from JJLS? 6. About standard and nonstandard Japanese language: 6-a. Does your family speak a dialect of Japanese language? If yes: 6-a-a. Do you speak it? If you do, with whom do you speak it? 6-a-b. Do you want to be able to communicate in your dialect? 6-a-c. Do you want to feel free to speak your dialect at JJLS? 6-a-d. Do you want JJLS to teach only standard Japanese? Why/Why not? 6-b. In your opinion, how should JJLS treat nonstandard varieties of the Japanese language? Why? 6-c. Have you ever been unable to understand a dialect different from your own? If yes, what did you do? 6-d. Has anyone ever been unable to understand your dialect? If yes, what did you do? 6-e. Have you spoken your dialect at JJLS? How did your teachers and friends react? How did you feel about reactions? 7. Identity/What makes a person Japanese: 7-a. What is your identity? 7-b. What do you think your parents’ identities are? 7-c. In your opinion, what has influenced you most in forming your identity? 7-d. Do you think JJLS has influenced your identity formation? If yes, how so? 7-e. Do you think living in the United States has influenced your identity formation? If yes, how so? 7-f. In your opinion, what makes a person Japanese? Any other comments?

Appendix 4. Second Questionnaires for Students 1. About JJLS: 1-a. Why do you study Japanese? Has your reason changed since you were in elementary/middle/high school? 1-b. Why do you continue to attend JJLS? Has your reason changed since you were in elementary/middle/high school? 1-c. Do you study Japanese in addition to studying at JJLS? Is this the same as when you were in elementary/middle/high school? 1-d. Have you thought about going to a full-time Japanese school? If yes, why? What made you decide against it? 1-e. What do you enjoy about JJLS? Has your opinion changed since you were in elementary/middle/high school? 1-f. What do you dislike about JJLS? Has your opinion changed since you were in elementary/middle/high school? 1-g. For students in the high school program: how do you feel about studying with students in different grades in two different programs? 1-h. Regarding teachers’ handling of student diversity, is there anything you feel they should continue/change? 1-i. What are the differences between regular American schools and JJLS, besides the languages used? Has your opinion changed since you were in elementary/middle/high school? 1-j. How do you think JJLS influences your identity, language maintenance, friends, etc.? Has your opinion changed since you were in elementary/ middle/high school? 1-k. Is there anything you want JJLS to change? 1-l. What is your plan for the near future? 2. About your social life: 2-a. Do you socialize mainly with friends from your regular American school or with friends from JJLS? Has your answer changed over time? 2-b. What are the differences/similarities between your friends at the regular school and those at JJLS? Has your answer changed over time? 2-c. Have your parents ever encouraged you to socialize more with either your friends from the regular school or those from JJLS? Has your answer changed over time? 2-d. Do you keep in touch with friends who have left JJLS?

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3. About standard and nonstandard Japanese language: 3-a. In your opinion, how should JJLS treat nonstandard varieties of Japanese language? Why? 3-b. Have you ever been unable to understand a dialect different from your own? If yes, what did you do? 3-c. Has anyone ever been unable to understand your dialect? If yes, what did you do? 3-d. Have you spoken your dialect at JJLS? How did your teachers and friends react? How did you feel about reactions? 4. Identity/What makes a person Japanese: 4-a. What is your identity? 4-b. What do you think your parents’ identities are? 4-c. In your opinion, what has influenced you most in forming your identity? 4-d. Do you think JJLS has influenced you in forming your identity? If yes, how so? 4-e. In your opinion, what makes a person Japanese? 5. About Jackson Course (only for students in hoshūkō-bu): 5-a. Have you thought about attending the Jackson Course? Why/Why not? 5-b. What images do you have of the Jackson Course? 5-c. Have the images you have of the Jackson Course changed over time? 6. About hoshūkō-bu (only for students in the Jackson Course): 6-a. Have you thought about attending hoshūkō-bu? Why/Why not? 6-b. What images do you have of hoshūkō-bu? 6-c. Have the image you have of hoshūkō-bu changed over time? 7. About visiting Japan: 7-a. How often do you go back to Japan? How long do you usually stay? 7-b. What do you enjoy most when you are in Japan? Is your answer the same as before? 7-c. Do you encounter any difficulties when you are in Japan? Has your answer changed over time? 7-d. Do you attend school when you are in Japan? Any other comments?

Appendix 5. Questionnaires for Teachers 1. Personal background: 1-a. Please describe your family members (age, gender, etc.). 1-b. Where were you born? 1-c. Where have you lived in the past? 1-d. Where was/were your child(ren) born? 1-e. What is/are the name(s) of the schools your child(ren) attend(s) during the week? 2. About your life in the United States: 2-a. When did you come to the United States? 2-b. Why did you come to the United States? 2-c. Did you know that you would come to the United States when you/your spouse started your/his/her job in Japan? 2-d. Do you plan to live in the States permanently or move somewhere else in the near future? If so, when? Where? 2-e. What things were you excited about in coming to the United States? 2-f. What things were you anxious about in coming to the United States? 2-g. How often do you go back to Japan? 2-h. When you are in Japan, does your child attend school there? 3. About JJLS: 3-a. Why did you decide to teach at JJLS? 3-b. Do(es) your child(ren) attend JJLS? If yes: 3-b-a. Have you thought about sending your child to a full-time Japanese school? If yes, why? What made you decide against it in the end? 3-b-b. Why did you decide to send your child to JJLS? When did you start sending your child to JJLS? 3-b-c. Why do you still send your child to JJLS? What do you want from JJLS? 3-b-d. What are the differences between regular American schools and JJLS, besides the languages used? 3-b-e. How do you think JJLS influences your child’s identity, language maintenance, friends, etc.? 3-c. How do you think JJLS influences you? 3-d. What do you think is the role of the JJLS Parents Association? 3-e. Is there anything you want JJLS to change? 4. Your experiences as a teacher at JJLS: 4-a. How do you feel about having students with diverse backgrounds – for example, differences in their family situation, their future plans, etc?

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4-b. What are the difficulties of having diverse students in class? 4-c. What are the benefits of having diverse students in class? 4-d. Do you consciously do anything differently to teach diverse students (as opposed to similar students)? 4-e. Do your students sometimes use English in class? What do you do when they do? 4-f. Do you sometimes use English in class? If yes, in what situations? 4-g. Have you thought about teaching in the Jackson Course? Why/Why not? 4-h. What images do you have of the Jackson Course? 4-i. Have the images you have of the Jackson Course changed over time? 5. About standard and nonstandard Japanese language: 5-a. Do you speak a dialect of Japanese language? If yes: 5-a-a. Do you speak it to family members at home? 5-a-b. Do you want your child to be able to communicate in your dialect? 5-a-c. Do you want your child to feel free to speak your dialect at JJLS? 5-a-d. Do you want JJLS to teach only in standard Japanese? Why/Why not? 5-b. If a student uses a dialect in class, what do you do? Do you correct him/her to conform to standard Japanese? Why/Why not? 5-c. Have you ever been unable to understand a dialect different from your own? If yes, what did you do? 5-d. Has anyone ever been unable to understand your dialect? If yes, what did you do? 6. Identity/What makes a person Japanese: 6-a. What is your identity? 6-b. What do you think your spouse’s identity is? 6-c. What do you think your child’s identity is? 6-d. In your opinion, what has influenced you most in forming your identity? 6-e. In your opinion, what has influenced your students most in forming their identities? 6-f. Do you think JJLS has influenced your identity formation? If yes, how so? 6-g. Do you think JJLS has influenced your students’ identity formation? If yes, how so? 6-h. In your opinion, what makes a person Japanese? Any other comments?

Appendix 6. Questionnaires for Parents of Students Who Were Leaving or Had Left JJLS 1. When did/will your child leave JJLS? 2. Why did your child decide to leave JJLS? 3. What did you look forward to about not sending your child to JJLS any more? 4. What were you anxious about in not sending your child to JJLS any more? 5. Had you thought about sending your child to the Jackson Course? 6. Has your life changed since your child left JJLS? If so, how? 7. Do you want to send your child to JJLS again? 8. In your opinion, how did JJLS influence your child? 9. In your opinion, how did JJLS influence your child’s cross-cultural understanding? 10. In your opinion, how did JJLS influence your child’s identity? 11. What were the pluses of sending your child to JJLS? 12. What were the minuses of sending your child to JJLS? 13. In your opinion, what did your child enjoy most at JJLS? 14. In your opinion, what did your child enjoy least at JJLS? 15. Do you think your child has been keeping in touch with friends from JJLS? 16. While attending JJLS, did your child also study Japanese outside JJLS? 17. Is he/she studying Japanese now? 18. If you could do it all over again, what would you like to do differently? 19. Do you have any advice for families who are considering sending their children to JJLS? 20. What are your plans going forward? Any other comments?

Appendix 7. Questionnaires for Students Who Were Leaving or Had Left JJLS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Why did you decide to leave JJLS? What did you look forward to about no longer coming to JJLS? What were you anxious about in leaving JJLS? Had you thought about attending the Jackson Course? Has your life changed since you left JJLS? If so, how? Do you want to go back to JJLS in the future? How did JJLS influence you? How did JJLS influence your cross-cultural understanding? How did JJLS influence your identity? What were the pluses of attending JJLS? What were the minuses of attending JJLS? What did you enjoy most at JJLS? What did you dislike most at JJLS? Have you been keeping in touch with friends from JJLS? While attending JJLS, did you study Japanese outside JJLS? If yes, why? Are you studying Japanese now? If you could do it all over again, what would you like to do differently? Do you have any advice for children who are considering attending JJLS? What are your plans going forward?

Any other comments?

Appendix 8. Summary of Student Interviews and Profiles The students we interviewed are listed alphabetically with the chapters in which they appeared. All names are pseudonyms, and those who did not appear in this study are not given names. One or both parents’ participation in the study is indicated by an asterisk next to the student’s name. Name, Chapters

Date of interview

Program at JJLS

Other remarks

Anne Akashi* (Eijū: Ch. 1, 5, & 6)

3/18/2007 3/14/2010

Started in preschool → hoshūkō-bu (graduated middle school and left JJLS in 2010).

Born in 1993 in the US; has lived in the JJLS area since age 2. Father: Japanese Mother: American

April Anderson* (Eijū: Ch. 7)

2/25/2007 2/6/2011

Started in preschool → hoshūkō-bu. Moved to Jackson Course in 2005.

Born in 1995 and raised in the JJLS area. Father: American Mother: Japanese

Jake Jefferson* (Eijū: Ch. 8)

3/4/2007 2/13/2011

Started in preschool → hoshūkō-bu (left in 2009).

Born in 1994 and raised in the JJLS area. Father: American Mother: Japanese

Junko Jones* (Eijū: Ch. 6)

2/4/2007 1/18/2009 2/27/2011

Started in preschool → hoshūkō-bu. Moved to Jackson Course in 2007, moved back to hoshūkō-bu in 2008 → high school.

Born in 1994 and raised in the JJLS area. Father: American Mother: Japanese

Kumiko Kato* (Chōki-taizai: Ch. 5 & 7)

2/17/2008 2/13/2011

Started in hoshūkōbu in 2006 → high school (graduated in 2012).

Born in 1994 in Japan; has lived in and out of Japan since age 5. Moved to the JJLS area in 2006. Went to college in Japan. Father: Japanese Mother: Japanese Stepfather: Greek

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Appendix

Name, Chapters

Date of interview

Program at JJLS

Other remarks

Kim Kong* (Chōki-taizai: Ch. 5 & 6)

5/20/2007

Started in JFL → Jackson Course (graduated in 2008).

Born in 1989 in Korea. Moved to the JJLS area in 4th grade. Went to college in the US. Father: Korean Mother: Korean

Mayumi Michaels* (Eijū: Ch. 1, 6, & 7)

2/25/2007 2/1/2009 1/30/2011

Started in preschool → hoshūkō-bu. Moved to Jackson Course in 2007 (left in 2011).

Born in 1994 and raised in the JJLS area. Father: American Mother: Japanese

Martin Moore* (Eijū: Ch. 6 & 7)

3/4/2007 2/6/2011

Started in Jackson Course → high school.

Born in 1996 in Japan. Moved to the JJLS area right after his birth. Father: American Mother: Japanese

Sasha Sasaki* (Eijū: Ch. 5 & 6)

5/27/2007 1/30/2011

Started in preschool → hoshūkō-bu. Moved to Jackson Course in 2004 (graduated in 2012).

Born in 1994 and raised in the JJLS area. Went to college in the US. Father: Japanese Mother: Chinese

Taro Tanaka (Chōki-taizai: Ch. 5)

4/22/2007 2/6/2011

Started hoshūkō-bu in 2005 → high school.

Born in 1994 in Japan. Moved to the JJLS area in 1999– 2000, then returned to Japan. Moved back to the JJLS area in 2005. Father: Japanese Mother: Japanese

Yaichi Yoneda* (Chūzai: Ch. 5)

3/11/2007 11/29/2009

Started in hoshūkōbu (returned to Japan).

Born in 1994 in Japan. Moved to the JJLS area in 2004, then returned to Japan in December 2009. Father: Japanese Mother: Japanese

Appendix 8. Summary of Student Interviews and Profiles

173

Name, Chapters

Date of interview

Program at JJLS

Other remarks

Student A* (Eijū)

3/11/2007 2/6/2011

Started in Jackson Course → high school (graduated in 2011)

Born in 1993 in the US and moved to the JJLS area in 2004. Went to college in the US. Father: American Mother: Japanese

Student B* (Chūzai )

2/4/2007 2/18/2007

Started in hoshūkōbu (returned to Japan).

Born in 1994 in Japan and lived in the JJLS area from 2003 to 2007. Father: Japanese Mother: Japanese

Student C* (Eijū)

10/21/2007 1/30/2011

Started in JFL → Jackson Course (graduated in 2011).

Born in 1994 in Switzerland. Moved to Japan and lived there until moving to the JJLS area in 2001. Went to college in the US. Father: American Mother: Japanese

Student D* (Eijū)

3/18/2007

Started in hoshūkōbu (left in 2008).

Born in 1994 in the US. Lived in Japan between 2001 and 2004; moved to the JJLS area in 2004. Father: ChineseJapanese Mother: American

Student E* (Chōki-taizai )

2/25/2007

Started in hoshūkōbu (left in 2009).

Born in 1994 in Japan. Came to the US in 2001 and lived in California and Chicago. Came to JJLS area in 2006. Father: Japanese Mother: Japanese

Appendix 9: Glossary of Japanese Terms chūzai chōki-taizai eijū hāhu

short-term sojourner long-term sojourner permanent resident a person born from an interracial marriage between Japanese and non-Japanese (often, non-Asian). The term is a transliteration of the English word half. hoshūkō weekend supplementary Japanese language schools approved by the Japanese government hoshūkō-bu the hoshūkō section of Jackson Japanese Language School kanji Chinese characters used in Japanese writing keishōgo heritage language kokugo national language/language arts kokusai kekkon international marriage/marriage between a Japanese citizen and a non-Japanese citizen

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Index Althusser, Louis 10, 145, 148 AP (Advanced Placement) exam 51, 108, 121–126, 130–138, 143, 152–153 applied linguistics 24, 39, 40 BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) 6, 27, 49, 55, 75, 143 bilingual 2, 9, 11, 22, 25, 43, 64, 86, 97, 99, 105, 113, 115–118, 121, 124–126, 129– 131, 134, 138, 140, 144, 146, 154 – education 3, 21–23, 37 – community education, 63, 80 Bourdieu, Pierre 3–4, 9–10, 16, 27–28, 33, 42, 99, 107, 119, 122 bogo/mother tongue speaker 19 Butler, Judith 9–11, 29 CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) 6, 49, 55, 140–143 chōki-taizai 47, 56, 72–73, 77, 100, 120, 151 chūzai 47, 71, 76–77, 79, 83, 87, 100, 103– 106, 120, 151 citationality/cite 10–11, 15, 29, 43, 57, 98, 113, 115, 129, 146 Community Language School 21 Course of Study, MEXT 5–6, 8, 12, 47, 49, 56, 63, 65, 68, 73–74, 76, 78–80, 85, 90–91, 99, 112, 117, 131, 140 Cummins, James 6, 122 Dean, Mitchell 2, 13–14, 81, 96, 98, 118, 147 dialect 27, 33–34, 36–37, 40, 61, 158, 161, 164, 166 eijū 47–48, 52, 55–56, 72–74, 77, 79, 83, 86, 97, 100, 128–129, 132, 143, 149, 151–152 ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) 41 ELT (English Language Teaching) 41 Fishman, Joshua 3–4, 8, 21 foreign language speaker 20, 22, 25 Foucault, Michel 2, 7–8, 11–13, 20, 28, 35, 58, 81, 96, 147

Gracía, Ofelia 19, 24, 37, 63, 80, 109, 154, 155 governmentality 2, 10, 12–15, 17, 81, 83, 96–98, 113, 115–118, 145–148 heritage language – definition of 7, 20, 22–23, 25, 44, 55 – effect 2–3, 6–8, 12, 28–29, 100, 119, 147–148, 155 hoshūkō 5, 45, 52, 56–57, 63–64, 69–71, 78, 99–100, 143, 151–152, 154, 174 – Japanese government’s policy on 65–68 – JJLS as 70–75 – MEXT-sent principal and 76–79 hoshūkō-bu 9, 12, 14, 17, 45–48, 52–55, 74– 76, 80 – choosing (not) to join 100–113, 128, 131, 133, 135–137 – fieldwork in 59–62 – governmentality of 81–97, 113–119 – perception of 98, 113–119 Jackson Course 9, 12, 16–18, 46–57, 63, 74– 76, 80, 98–99, 121, 130, 136, 139–145, 147–151 – choosing (not) to join 100–113, 128, 131, 133, 135–137 – fieldwork in 58–62 – governmentality of 81–91, 94–95, 97, 113–119 – perception of 113–119 JFL (Japanese as a Foreign Language) at JJLS 27, 45, 47–49, 55–56, 71, 75–76, 78 – learner 121, 126, 136–138, 148 JJLS (Jackson Japanese Language School) 9, 12, 15–17, 45–48, 52–58, 63–64, 70– 80, 91, 96, 100, 120–122, 134–145, 147 kanji 6, 46, 49–51, 82–83, 85, 88, 102, 104, 106, 110–111, 115–116, 142, 152, 174 keishōgo 1, 3, 6, 8–9, 17, 45, 52, 56–57, 64, 69, 74–76, 78, 80, 86, 91, 96, 99–101, 108–109, 112–117, 119–121, 125–126, 136–137, 140–141, 143, 146–149, 174

188

Index

– kokugo vs. 17, 56–57, 98–101, 103, 108– 109, 112–113, 115–117, 143, 147 knowledge and power 2–4, 11–16, 28–29, 35, 58, 81, 90–91, 119, 122, 147 kokugo 3, 5, 6, 8, 48–49, 52, 75–76, 78, 80–81, 107, 110–111, 119, 121, 126, 140–141, 144, 149, 153–154, 174 – vs. keishōgo, see kokugo vs. keishōgo kokusai kekkon 56, 68, 174 Krashen, Stephen 25–26, 34, 53–54, 101, 118, 122, 149

pedagogy 4, 23, 25–26, 34, 38, 43, 46, 53, 56, 151, 153–154 performativity 10–11, 15, 29, 37, 43, 57, 83, 98, 113, 146 policy – American mainstream educational 15, 123, 135 – Japanese/MEXT 63–68, 70, 72–73, 78– 80, 146–147 – on minority language in the United States 19–21, 64

language shyness 25, 53–54, 57, 149, 152 linguistic-proficiency-based definition of heritage language learner 4, 25–27, 38, 44, 56, 150

regime of difference 9–11, 15, 17, 23, 25, 29–30, 38, 44, 55–57, 98, 101, 103, 106–109, 112–113, 115–117, 129, 133, 136–137, 143, 145–148, 151, 155 regime of truth 7, 20

MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) 5, 10, 12, 17, 56–57, 63–81, 85–86, 90–92, 97–99, 108, 112–117, 131, 139–141, 143–144, 151–152 – certified textbooks 6, 75, 90, 93, 99, 140 – sent principal 12, 45–47, 60, 64, 68–74, 76–79, 90, 95, 99, 139, 143–144 – Course of Study, see Course of Study, MEXT MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) 5, 99, 152 nation-state 6–7, 13, 20, 30–33, 36–38, 109 – nation building 6–7, 109 national language, see kokugo native speaker 1–2, 4, 8–9, 13, 20, 22, 25, 27, 37–43, 52–55, 57, 90, 101, 118, 121, 136, 146, 149, 151

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory 40 self-esteem-based definition of heritage language learner 3, 23–27, 29, 37, 44, 55 standardization 13, 20, 30, 32–38, 41 standard language 6, 27, 34, 39–41 structural linguistics 36 Valdés, Guadalupe 3, 22–27, 34, 55, 122 weekend Japanese language school 1, 5, 8, 52–53, 65, 78, 123, 144, 152, 154, 174 Yasuda, Toshiaki 6, 109