Children in Need of Bilingual Education in Japan
(Article in Japanese only)
Yukawa Emiko
Notre Dame Women's College
This paper addresses issues related to the need for bilingual education in Japan. Its purpose is two-fold. One is to present an overview of the current state of bilingual education (or lack of it) in Japan for "Children in need of bilingual education" (CNBE) by trying to answer the following questions: (I) What kinds of background do the CNBE in Japan have, how many of each type are there, and where do they live? (II) What types of bilingual education are currently offered to CNBE and by whom? and (III) What levels of proficiency have CNBE attained in their two languages as the result of such bilingual education? The other purpose of this paper is to briefly review bilingual education programs in Europe and North America, and then juxtapose this review with the current situation in Japan in order to suggest a direction that Japanese bilingual education should take in the future.
Three categories of "Children in need of bilingual education" are identified: (1) foreign children who have recently come to live in Japan and have not yet acquired Japanese or have limited proficiency in it; (2) children of long-term foreign residents (such as Koreans) and Japan's indigenous minorities (such as Ainus) and children born to mixed couples, all of whom have Japanese as their first language (L1); and (3) returnee children whose L1 Japanese needs some improvement for them to be integrated into regular Japanese schools. It was found that in 1997, there were 16,835 category 1 children and a similar number of category 3 children in Japan, but the number of children in category 2 proved difficult to estimate.
Some CNBE (mostly those concentrated in certain geographical areas and going to the same schools in large numbers) are offered various types of instruction in the Japanese language; however those who are the only CNBE in their school do not necessarily enjoy such service. CNBE are in general given education in their non-Japanese L1 to a much lesser degree, and when education in the minority language is offered, it tends to be provided by volunteers in the community or on a commercial basis rather than by the public education system. Thus, the degree and quality of education in their two languages vary greatly depending on the local community the CNBE live in and on which category they belong to. As a result, these children tend to be either Japanese monolinguals or to have acquired less than the monolingual norm in both of their languages. Long-term Korean residents and Ainus (category 2) are mostly Japanese monolinguals. Some children of Indochinese refugees and children from China (category 1) seem to be following the Korean and Ainu example. Japanese returnee children from overseas also tend to show a similar linguistic profile in their two languages.
The paper goes on to review three of what Baker (1996) terms "weak forms" of bilingual education and two "strong forms" of bilingual education from the West. It concludes that Japan should aim for one of the strong forms of bilingual education for its CNBE and should hire more specialists in Japanese as a second language.
