Introduction

Abstract

Ms. Ayabe is busy teaching immigrant and refugee students in a pullout Japanese as a second language (JSL) class. She is a teacher in charge of teaching non-Japanese-speaking children at Sugino Public Elementary School. Although there are only four students in this JSL class, they are all at different Japanese proficiency levels and require individualized instruction. Ms. Ayabe quickly enlists me as a makeshift teaching assistant, pairing me up with Kim, a Vietnamese boy, while she herself works one-on-one with a Chinese girl, keeping an eye on two other students who are working on handwriting exercises. She is gentle and motherly towards her students, scaffolding their learning in a soothing voice and encouraging them to try just one more exercise. Most of the students are working on basic-level literacy, learning hiragana and katakana (two basic scripts in Japanese) and grades 1–2 level kanji (Chinese characters), although some are much older than grade 2. Kim, for instance, is a fifth grader and yet is barely reading at the grade 2 level in Japanese.KeywordsCultural CapitalSocioeconomic ClassisBilingual EducationBilingual StudentChinese GirlThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.