Heritage language learners in a multicultural society: the influence of Japanese immigrant descendants’ relation with the Japanese language on their identities and Japanese learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Because of its cultural diversity, Canada has been seen as a rich mosaic and has thus been the object of an increasing amount of research on multi-cultural/lingual education. The advance of Canadian multiculturalism may continue; it stands to reason that heritage language (HL) learners’ views of themselves will change along with this advance, consequently influencing their HL learning opportunities and experiences. In this study, I inquire into adult beginner Japanese HL learners’ perceptions of their identities and relationships with the Japanese language. Taking a social constructivist view, I address the following issues 1) what Japanese language means to Japanese immigrant descendants with no or little Japanese knowledge; 2) how their decisions about Japanese learning and/or use are made and influence their identity construction; and 3) how they perceive Japanese HL (re-) learning as adults.In this qualitative study, I collected data from six adult Japanese HL beginner learners (four data sets out of the six data sets were used for the analysis and discussion) and one adult Japanese foreign language (FL) beginner learner in Montreal through semi-structured and in-depth interviews and diaries over a period of 10 to 12 weeks. I analyzed the data from four of the HL learners and used the FL learner’s data as supporting data. In order to understand the learning context of adult HL learners in this geographical area, I also interviewed six instructors who taught Japanese in Quebec. My findings suggest that: adult HL learners in a multicultural context continuously cross not only cultural, linguistic, or geographical borders, but also temporal borders; HL has a strong impact on their positioning in the family even after they become adults, and this positioning process is extremely complex. Including a concept of ‘mobility’ (Kawakami, 2018, 2022) and focusing on the struggles of children or youth and their process of growth may lead to a deeper understanding of the identity construction of youth in multicultural contexts
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".