Japanese Immersion Research Articles

What makes students speak Japanese in immersion programs?

Language immersion programs, which are a form of bilingual education, are shaped by multiple factors, including the specific characteristics of the region, the language, the community and the learners, as well as national and regional policies on language education. While the underdeveloped production skills of immersion students have been identified as the product of teacher-centred and controlled learning environments, it is not known what role background or heritage language students play in the Australian one-way immersion context, where their presence itself potentially enhances the speaking environment. This paper, based on a project on developing speaking strategies for a Japanese immersion program in Australia, argues that the speaking performance of students in immersion classes is also determined by other factors, such as peer interactions with background students, whose treatment in education systems in Australia remains ambiguous, reflecting the history of separation between foreign language education in schools and the maintenance of mother tongues in the community. By applying Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this paper analyses language policy and educational documents and discusses how the language performance of individual learners could be influenced not only by the curriculum but also by policy makers’ improved understanding of individual learners with diverse linguistic backgrounds within schools.

Academic Achievement of English-Speaking Students in a Japanese Immersion Program

Academic Achievement of English-Speaking Students in a Japanese Immersion Program

Learning Effect and Environment of Japanese Immersion Education in Major Courses

Learning Effect and Environment of Japanese Immersion Education in Major Courses

Educational conditions and the role of Japanese immersion education in courses designed to improve linguistic skills

Educational conditions and the role of Japanese immersion education in courses designed to improve linguistic skills

The influence of context on patterns of corrective feedback and learner uptake: a comparison of CLIL and immersion classrooms

This study compares the frequency and distribution of different types of corrective feedback (CF) (recasts, prompts and explicit correction) and learner uptake in 43 hours of classroom interaction at the 4th–5th grade level across three instructional settings: (1) two content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classrooms in Spain with English as the target language; (2) four French immersion (FI) classrooms in Quebec (using published data from Lyster and Ranta 1997); and (3) three Japanese immersion (JI) classrooms in the US (using published data from Lyster and Mori 2006). The findings revealed that teachers in all three settings used recasts, prompts and explicit correction in similar proportions, with recasts being the most frequent, followed by prompts then explicit correction. However, in the CLIL and JI classrooms, the majority of learner repair moves followed recasts, whereas the majority of repair moves in FI classrooms followed prompts. The similarities and differences across contexts are discussed in terms of the different types of recasts used by the teachers (i.e. didactic recasts in CLIL and JI; conversational recasts in FI), as well as in terms of context-specific influences and the teachers' professional trajectories.

Limited effects of early language learning on second language speech production.

Knightly et al. (2003) report long‐term production benefits of childhood second language (L2) exposure in a naturalistic setting. However, it is unknown whether or not their finding will apply to classroom L2 learning. This study compares the production of voice onset time (VOT) in English and Japanese and closure duration of singletons and geminates in Japanese by English‐speaking university students (n=15) who graduated from a Japanese immersion program (early learners) and adult learners of Japanese (n=15) with no exposure to Japanese in childhood (late learners). The informants were asked to repeat several target words including initial /p, t, k/ for VOT, and medial /p, t, k/ and /pp, tt, kk/ for singletons and geminates in a sentence frame. Both VOT of the initial stops and closure duration of the medial stops were measured. The results show that the production of VOT and closure duration by the early learners was not significantly different from that of the late learners (p=0.71 and p=0.13, respecti...

Language learning

Language learning

Language learning

Language learning

The production of voice onset time (VOT) by English-speaking children in a Japanese immersion program

This study analyzed the production of voice onset time (VOT) for /p, t, k/ in Japanese and English by English-speaking children (n = 15) in a Japanese immersion program. The immersion children produced Japanese voiceless stops with significantly longer VOT values than the monolingual Japanese children and the immersion teachers, but they produced them with significantly shorter VOT values than their English VOT. This suggests that the immersion students are making a phonetic distinction in VOT between Japanese and English, though their VOT values are still intermediate, compared with the norms of the monolingual speakers and their immersion teachers. In other words, the immersion children implemented the VOT contrast differently from the model they were exposed to, that is, that of the Japanese English bilingual teachers.

The long-term retention of phonetic categories by Japanese immersion graduates

English-speaking children in a Japanese immersion program, in which many content subjects are taught in Japanese, were reported to be successful in establishing phonetic categories for single and geminate stops in Japanese, although their categories deviated from those of Japanese monolinguals. However, it is unknown to what extent those children can retain their phonetic categories after they exit the program. Ten participants who had attended a Japanese immersion program in the United States from kindergarten or grade 1 to grade 5 and who were taking a university-level intermediate or advanced Japanese course at the time of data collection were recorded producing Japanese words including both singletons and geminates. Mean closure duration values were obtained, and the ratio of geminates to singletons for the immersion graduates was compared with that of English learners of Japanese having the same proficiency level in a regular Japanese program. The results show that the immersion graduates, who had been exposed to a substantial amount of Japanese at an early age, still retained the phonetic categories and could contrast singletons with geminates in Japanese, although their closure duration tended to be longer than the norm of monolingual Japanese speakers.

THE ACQUISITION OF SINGLE AND GEMINATE STOPS BY ENGLISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN IN A JAPANESE IMMERSION PROGRAM

This study acoustically analyzed the production of single and geminate stops in Japanese by English-speaking children (N = 19) at three different grade levels in a Japanese immersion program. Results show that both their singletons and geminates were significantly longer than those of Japanese monolinguals and the bilinguals' immersion teachers, but all of the immersion groups have acquired the contrast between the two types of stop. This finding supports Flege's (1995) hypothesis that a phonetic category established for second language sounds by a bilingual might differ from that of a monolingual. Additionally, 52 native speakers of Japanese rated the contrast between the two stops produced by all of the bilingual children and a subset of the monolingual children. The accent ratings suggest that the contrast made by the immersion children was not nativelike despite some individual differences in their performance and that there was no statistical difference in accent ratings across the grade levels. The degree of the contrast correlated fairly highly with the closure duration ratio of geminates to singletons.Part of this article was presented at the 2000 AAAL Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia and the 2001 AAAL Conference, St. Louis, MO. I would like to thank Dr. R. Campbell, Dr. M. Celce-Murcia, Dr. S. Guion, Dr. S. Iwasaki, and Dr. S.-A. Jun as well as the anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to the children and their teachers for their participation in this study, without whom it would not have been possible.

INTERACTIONAL FEEDBACK AND INSTRUCTIONAL COUNTERBALANCE

This comparative analysis of teacher-student interaction in two different instructional settings at the elementary-school level (18.3 hr in French immersion and 14.8 hr Japanese immersion) investigates the immediate effects of explicit correction, recasts, and prompts on learner uptake and repair. The results clearly show a predominant provision of recasts over prompts and explicit correction, regardless of instructional setting, but distinctively varied student uptake and repair patterns in relation to feedback type, with the largest proportion of repair resulting from prompts in French immersion and from recasts in Japanese immersion. Based on these findings and supported by an analysis of each instructional setting's overall communicative orientation, we introduce the counterbalance hypothesis, which states that instructional activities and interactional feedback that act as a counterbalance to a classroom's predominant communicative orientation are likely to prove more effective than instructional activities and interactional feedback that are congruent with its predominant communicative orientation.This research was supported by Standard Research Grants (410-98-0175 and 410-2002-0988) awarded to the first author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by a Nihon University Individual Research Grant for 2005 awarded to the second author. A version of this study was presented at the Second Language Research Forum held at Columbia University in October 2005. We are especially grateful to the participating teachers and their students and also to Yingli Yang for her role as research assistant in aggregating the datasets. We thank Sue Gass, Alison Mackey, Iliana Panova, Leila Ranta, and two SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Interactional routines as a mechanism for L2 acquisition and socialization in an immersion context

Language learning cannot be separated from the setting in which it is used, and language socialization research has shown that children acquire sociocultural knowledge of their native language (L1) through participation in language mediated activities in the home and community. How do young children with already established sociocultural competence in L1 acquire competency in second language (L2) interactional skills? This study examines how kindergartners are socialized to initiate and respond to L2 discourse sequences in a Japanese immersion classroom. Using video-taped naturalistic data of classroom interactions, children's performance of three daily routines is analyzed qualitatively, noting scaffolded help provided by the teacher, peers, and changes in content and participant structure over several months. Data reveal increasing autonomy in initiating and responding roles and spontaneous incorporation of a routine in a novel situation, demonstrating that routines provide a framework and mechanism for L2 competence beyond the level of creative L2 output, which basically remained at the word-level throughout the first year.

Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Japanese Immersion School

Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Japanese Immersion School

Report on a university Japanese immersion course

Report on a university Japanese immersion course

Implicit Culture in Japanese Immersion Classroom Discourse

Implicit Culture in Japanese Immersion Classroom Discourse

An oral interview procedure for assessing second language abilities in children

There has been a recent proliferation of Japanese language immersion schools in the USA, reflecting a surge of interest in developing Japanese language abilities in ever-younger children. Efforts to develop and evaluate programmes, though, are hindered by the absence of assessment instruments for measuring progress and competence in young children. In this article we present the goals, design and pilot-testing results of a new oral interview procedure for eliciting a representative sample of spontaneous Japanese language abilities from children aged 5-10. The test consists of six subsets and makes use of realia, role playing, information gap activities and naturalistic conversation, all designed to comprise an oral interview that is devel opmentally appropriate and comparable across children of different levels in different programmes, while overcoming some of the special problems of children's reluctance to interact as equal conversational partners with unfamiliar adults. Pilot results show that the procedure elicits a language sample that is superior in quality and quantity to other existing Japanese language assessment instruments for children.