Immigrant communities face educational challenges in the 'motherland'

Immigrant communities face educational challenges in the 'motherland'

In Japan, most educational discourse in recent years centres on reforms and their effects upon academic achievement, well-being, and future prospects of lives of youth in the context of chronic economic uncertainty (Gordon, Fujita, Kariya, & LeTendre, 2009). On the other hand, the situation recent immigrant communities are facing is being largely neglected except for charges of crime and related social problems (cf. Kobayashi, 2010). In particular, the educational challenge combined with language barriers and cultural differences that they face is passing mostly unnoticed outside the school. In this article, I wish to open up and bring to the attention of a wider audience (who do not share Japanese language) this issue pertaining to language, migration, and education as it relates to Japan. The article presents the background of the issue, and provides an illustration which I hope may give rise to more discussion on how linguistic research and applied linguistics may contribute to unravel the complexity of this issue, which may be similar but distinct from that in Australia.

LingAppl@ Quarterly is an on-line only journal. Published version available at publisher's link: http://www.lingappl.com/vol-2-page-2.html