This study investigated a Japanese heritage speaker’s learning of Japanese. As a characteristic of heritage language (HL) speakers, they tend to understand the informal variety of their HL that is used in their family environment, while the formal variety or the language used in an academic setting is not in their command. The current qualitative study provided a four-week intensive Japanese reading and writing program for a female Japanese HL speaker. She was a university sophomore, lived in Los Angeles, and had no experience of attending Japanese classes or Japanese school. The program asked the Japanese HL speaker to read an editorial of a newspaper published in Japan daily and to write a summary of the editorial and her associated opinion, as well as to keep a journal about her learning experience and difficulty with the task of the program, which was recorded in English. The study admitted her high proficiency of reading Japanese editorials and writing her opinions in Japanese despite the fact that she had never learned Japanese in a formal classroom setting. Her daily English journals and weekly interviews revealed that her identity as a Japanese person had motivated her to improve her Japanese proficiency. The implication of the research findings elucidates that providing a positive image of the heritage language and the associated culture and nurturing a healthy identity as the speaker of the language as a child would facilitate a HL speaker to study in a self-motivated context.

Authors:
Mayumi Ajioka, University of California, Los Angeles, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Ms Mayumi Ajioka is a University Doctoral Student at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in United States

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

Bookmark