Contesting heritage: language, legitimacy, and schooling at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States

Abstract

Researchers have shown that the maintenance of a minority language has positive effects on the minority students' view of self, educational attainment, and career opportunities (Cho 2000; Wright and Taylor 1995). In the research for this article, however, we found that such a focus on the effects of heritage-language education on the students is of limited usefulness in analyzing the complex processes of heritage-language education. Based on our ethnographic study at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States, we illustrate contestations among administrators, students, and parents regarding the legitimacy of two types of Japanese heritage-language program and diverse subjectivities of heritage-language students that are causes and effects of such contestations. We suggest approaching heritage-language education not merely as an effort to enhance awareness of one's heritage or an instruction in language but also as a schooling process in which legitimacy of the knowledge and ways to achieve it are contested in the process of students and parents navigating what school offers, the students' linguistic proficiencies, their future educational prospects, and their diasporic subjectivities.