Japan Away from Japan: The Tehran Supplementary Japanese School

Abstract

How can my multi-racial children maintain and even improve their competency in their heritage languages? This is a common struggle in any multi-racial families as in most cases their daily life outside the home is carried out in one of the languages of theirs. Particularly, in the case of the biracial families of Japanese and Iranian heritages in Tehran, Iran, this struggle seemed quite serious. During the three years from 2013 to 2016, the authors observed Iranian/Japanese biracial children and families at the Tehran supplementary Japanese school where the children learned writing and reading in Japanese once a week. And the authors found that the key to successfully maintaining and improving their Japanese level greatly depended on their learning environment especially at home and appropriate cultural context where they could get exposed to Japanese culture as they used the language.

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Author Information
Kaya Munakata, Kanda University of International Studies, Japan
Shinji Munakata, a Kawasaki City elementary school, Japan

• Category: ACLL2017, Virtual Presentation
• Tag: Learning Environments,

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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