Language Attitudes of Language Minority Children:
Micro-Ethnographic Approach From the Perspectives of Language Proficiencies and Perceived Language Values
Sato Maki, Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan
Development of the mother tongue has been shown to be important for the linguistic, cognitive and emotional development of language minority children (Cummins & Swain, 1986; Nakajima, 1998, etc.). In recent years, programs for the maintenance and development of language minority children’s first language have gradually been established in Japan, but little research has been done on the attitudes the children themselves have towards their first and second languages. To help fill that gap, this paper reports on a case study of four children of Korean families living in Japan whose fathers are here on business. All four speak Korean as their native language and were in the fourth grade of Japanese elementary school at the time of the study. The methodology adopted was micro-ethnography, with qualitative analysis made of data collected during observation in the children’s Korean language support classroom and their classrooms in the Japanese elementary schools they attend, as well as interviews with the children themselves, their mothers, and teachers at both the Korean language support classroom and their Japanese schools. Three main language attitudes were observed: 1) resistance to the use of Korean, 2) commitment to Japanese, and 3) positive acceptance of Korean. This revealed that the children tend to have negative attitudes toward their native language and prefer to use Japanese, although in some contexts, they did display positive attitudes toward their mother tongue. The situations in which the children revealed negative attitudes toward Korean were then analyzed from the perspectives of the degree of language ability that is required in the context and of the value placed on the language by the children. The results suggest in some cases, the apparent negative attitude is due to the fact that the children’s Korean language proficiency has decreased as their stay in Japan has become longer—that is, they “cannot use” Korean in such contexts, while in others, the negative attitude is the result of the low value that the children have come to place on their native tongue—that is, they simply “will not use” Korean.
(This paper is written in Japanese)
