Classroom socialisation: repair and correction in Japanese as a heritage language

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the classroom socialisation of a mundane institutional language policy regarding the use of the target language: Japanese. Based on audiovisual recordings in a Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) classroom, it analyses episodes when teachers initiated repair on children’s novel English loanwords (i.e. English-based words pronounced in Japanese but not widely accepted and used), in ways that treated them (or sometimes the social actions performed through them) as problematic. Through a multimodal analysis of other-initiated repair turns and the sequences in which they were lodged, it examines how students responded, and whether and how teachers engaged in correction. In aiming to bridge research on classroom discourse using conversation analysis (CA) and language socialisation, the paper argues how repair and correction are practices for conveying the school language policy to ‘speak only in Japanese’. It also argues that these practices have the potential for socialising students beyond the classroom, to membership into (an imagined) Japanese society where monitoring one’s language use as a bilingual Japanese-English speaker may be important because the excessive use of English loanwords can become an object of others’ negative attitudes and evaluations.

KEYWORDS:

• Conversation analysis
• correction
• Japanese
• language socialisation
• repair

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the participants in this study, the attendees of the Spring 2020 CAN-Asia workshop (Tim Greer, Erik Hauser, John Campbell Larson, Mika Ishino, Yosuke Ogawa, Zack Nambu, and Amar Cheikhna) where the data and an earlier version of this paper was presented, and the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback. Any errors and misunderstandings are my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. I want to thank Erik Hauser for this observation.

2. Loanwords such as jetto koosutaa (literally, ‘jet coaster’ to mean ‘roller coaster’), which have been constructed from English are often referred to colloquially as wasei eigo ‘English loanwords coined in Japanese’ (Miller 1997) or ‘Japanized English words’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Burdelski

Matthew Burdelski is a Professor of Japanese linguistics in the Faculty of Letters at Osaka University. Focusing on Japanese and US classrooms and communities, his research utilises language socialisation and multimodal conversation analysis to investigate adult-child and children’s interactions in teaching, acquiring, and using Japanese as a first, second, and heritage language.