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Abstract
This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n=28) and parent (n=67) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a Japanese–English bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis was conducted to derive three underlying CALE components, each representing educational intervention strategies. These three components were comprised of primary loadings that depict the respective aspects of the Japanese transnational experience with their children's supplementary education during their overseas sojourns and reveal families' needs for: L1 maintenance communities, L2 acquisition support, and a means to convert their children's bilingual skills into academic credentials that are adequate for both L1 and L2 contexts. Principal components were thus interpreted as sojourning families' three approaches to environmental structuring: a Japanese Cultural Community Approach, a Quasi-Bilingual Approach, and a Japanese Test-oriented Approach. Implications are drawn, both for the sojourning community and for future research needs.
Acknowledgement
Part of this research was conducted while the author was a visiting scholar at the Center for Multicultural Education, University of Washington, Seattle.
Notes
1. JOES is a foundation managed jointly by the Education Ministry and the Foreign Affairs Ministry and is largely supported by membership dues paid by Japanese firms and organizations with foreign operations (Kaigai Citation2007–2008).
2. According to the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT Citation2007), roughly 55,000 Japanese children of compulsory school age (Grades 1–9) lived outside Japan as of 15 April 2006. Until 2004, most of them lived in the USA, but this changed in 2006, since which time slightly more live in Asia (MEXT Citation2006b).
3. For example, well-known universities such as Waseda, Sophia, International Christian University, and Keio Shonan Fujisawa Campus have special returnee entrance examinations held twice a year for entry in April and September. Other universities, such as Dokkyo, Kanagawa, and Toyohashi University of Technology have special returnee admissions procedures for April only.
4. Certainly tuition at KONY (at the time of the study, roughly $26,000 per year) resulted in a selection of well-endowed families. The study thus, examines environmental structuring under conditions in which economic constraints are relatively lifted.
5. Students are put on the ‘escalator’ system with automatic promotion to Keio University in Japan whose well-known status there motivates students to achieve in Japanese-taught classes (Langager Citation1999).
6. After the economic recession of the latter 1990s, companies chose fewer and younger expatriates, resulting in fewer applicants. To maintain a reasonable student count, KONY changed its policy, now admitting roughly half of its students directly from Japan (Mr Masashi Notsu, personal communication).
7. Data rendered were useful for multiple meaningful analyses with satisfactory p values.
8. To allow ample space for students who had repeated any of their schooling years.
9. The use of Bs and Es was not included in the original LHC approach; I owe the idea to Catherine Snow. It is to compensate for the fact that the surveys are being completed by subjects themselves, rather than by an interviewer as originally intended by the Caspi et al. This way a backup is provided in case subjects fail to connect the ‘beginning’ X with the ‘ending’ X.
10. An index.
11. Of the 132 parent surveys sent out, 67 were returned, giving a 51% return rate, which is higher than typical for Japanese populations (Hidenori Fujita, personal communication).
12. Bivariate plots of the different variables were examined to confirm linearity or, when non-linear, determine the appropriate remedial transformations. Thus, square root transformations were applied to: Juku, Other English, and Visiting enrollment to achieve linearity in their bivariate plots with other variables.
13. Atypical datapoints were identified on the bivariate plots for Japanese tutoring versus Visiting enrollment and Juku versus Visiting enrollment. Separate correlations, with these two datapoints included and removed, showed only a marginal difference in correlation in the English camp versus HoshÛkô plot (r=0.16 → 0.21; p<0.20 → 0.10, Tables B1 and B2, Appendix 2). However, as differences were not detectable in bivariate plots of variables in which the atypicality itself occured, all datapoints were retained in the analysis.
14. Rotation was not conducted on the eigenvectors in order to preserve a multifarious account of sojourners' strategies for structuring their children's academic language environments. In many PCA studies interpretation of eigenvectors is complicated by the intrinsic similarity of variables represented in respective eigenvalues. The Doty et al. (Citation1994) study, for example, sought to ‘determine … the degree to which a number of nominally distinct olfactory tests are related to one another’ (702). A common method of facilitating interpretation of eigenvectors is to rotate them to obtain a ‘simple structure’ (Bryant and Yarnold Citation1995, 105). However, as Dunteman explains (Citation1989, 50), ‘since both the unrotated and rotated solutions explain exactly the same amount of variation in the variables, the choice between the two hinges upon their interpretability from the researcher's perspective.’ In the current study PCA was conducted on variables of overseas Japanese supplementary education which were sufficiently dissimilar to override concerns of redundancy. Clearly, participation in an English-speaking summer camp, for example, is not similar to attendance at a Japanese test preparation center in the same way as different olfactory sense measurements can be, as in Doty et al.'s (Citation1994) study. Mutual non-correlation thus proved to be a sufficient basis for defining each component in the current study. Moreover, most of the variables had factor loading coefficients of over 0.30 (or under–0.30) on most of the retained components, justifying their ‘loading’ status on the respective eigenvectors (Bryant and Yarnold Citation1995, 106). In other words, multiple variables were important for interpreting all three retained components as ‘approaches,’ and these interpretations were enriched with the nuances contributed by respective eigenvalues, obviating the usefulness of rotation.
15. In many cases students were undoubtedly targeting entrance into KONY (and of course they were successful, as KONY is where the data were collected, but so were Low JTA-scoring subjects in the study).
16. As of 15 April 2004, according to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) report, 16% of hoshÛkô students worldwide were in the first grade of elementary school, whereas only 6.2% were in their last year of lower secondary school (ninth grade), and the decreases were consistently incremental across the nine compulsory schooling grades (100% total).
17. Of the Japanese elementary and lower secondary level children sojourning worldwide as of 15 April 2006, 29 and 24%, respectively, attended hoshÛkô (59 and 51%, respectively, in North America), according the author's calculations of figures published by MOFA (MEXT Citation2006a).
18. For example, in the City of Cambridge, MA, Two-Way Immersion programs are well established for a combination of English and an array of languages, including Chinese and Korean. Japanese families, however, have tended to be disinterested in placing their children in such a program, responding that they would prefer that their children be taught in Japanese at the hoshÛkô run by their own expatriate community and only in English at the public schools (Mary Cazabon, personal communication).