Heritage-Language Literacy Practices: A Case Study of Three Japanese American Families

Abstract

This article documents the heritage-language (HL) literacy practices of three Japanese American families residing in a predominantly Anglo and Latino community. Through interviews and observations, this study investigates Japanese children's HL-literacy practices, parental attitudes toward HL literacy, and challenges in HL-literacy development in a setting with minimal access to other HL speakers and resources. The data show that Japanese-literacy practices differed in each family, reflecting the situated nature of literacy and each family's unique needs for literacy. By providing exposure to varied forms of literacy texts and practices, the parents were instrumental in supporting their children's Japanese-literacy skills. Japanese literacy gave the children a strong foundation upon which to build their HL, supported familial relations, and also created channels of communication among family members. Although the parents possessed a focused commitment to achieve native-like HL literacy skills for their children, they were skeptical that their children would be able to reach this goal. The lack of external support, such as HL-speaking peers, HL schools, and accessible information about pedagogical strategies and resources, was perceived as a barrier to their efforts in helping their children sustain a high level of interest in HL-literacy practices.

Notes

¹ Hoshuko, supplementary schools, are primarily for children who are temporarily in the United States and are planning to return to Japan. They are typically offered on the weekends and are financially supported by the Japanese government. Most of the schools follow the academic standards used in schools in Japan so that children can keep up with Japanese grade-level standards.

²Japanese is written with a combination of three kinds of characters: one ideographic character, kanji, and two syllabic characters, hiragana and katakana. Hiragana has 46 basic syllables that enable the transcription of all Japanese sounds. It is used for conjugation endings, function words, and native Japanese words that kanji does not cover. Katakana, whose pronunciation and combination are the same as those of hiragana, is used for loanwords and foreign names. Kanji characters, which represent meaning as well as sounds, are generally used for nouns and the stems of verbs and adjectives (Banno, Ono, Sakane, & Shinagawa, 1999). In elementary school education (from first to sixth grade), children are expected to acquire 1006 kanji letters (MEXT, 2009). Reading a Japanese newspaper generally requires knowledge of approximately 2000 kanji characters (Agency of Cultural Affairs, 2010).