Abstract
Along with Japan’s rapid economic growth in the latter part of the 20th century, came a push to internationalize Japanese society. While cities were privileged places for this, the suburbs also aimed to achieve internationalization, although with different resources and challenges. This paper focuses on two types of “internationalization from within", one which involved supporting and integrating refugees and newcomers into Japanese communities and schools, and another which involved building the foreign language ability of Japanese children in the school system. Both of these occurred in a suburban town outside the Tokyo metropolitan area. Over several decades the relationship between a community college there and the local government has produced multiple sustainable language support programs for both English and Japanese. This paper reports the thirty-year evolution of college service-learning programs and some of the long-term results of service-learning partnerships between the college and the local board of education. It contextualizes how one suburban community welcomed first Indochinese refugees and later newcomers from South America and other Asian countries. It also shows how a college language department partnered with the local board of education to meet various learner needs at the primary and secondary school level. Based on these experiences, the presentation recommends expanding the use of community partnerships in language programs and newcomer support in Japan and suggests some best practices for designing such programs. In our community, such programs have created considerable gains for both college students and the community which should encourage the expansion of such partnerships.
Author Information
Maria Lupas, Sophia University Junior College Division, Japan
Sachie Miyazaki, Sophia University Junior College Division, Japan
Akiko Kano, Sophia University Junior College Division, Japan
Paper Information
Conference: IICAH2025
Stream: Immigration
This paper is part of the IICAH2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Lupas M., Miyazaki S., & Kano A. (2025) Leaving No One Behind in Suburban Japan’s Internationalization: Language Teaching for Community Integration and Empowerment ISSN: 2432-4604 – The IAFOR International Conference on Arts & Humanities – Hawaii 2025 Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 119-124) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2432-4604.2025.11
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2432-4604.2025.11
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