Escolarización de experiencia en colegios de primaria japoneses

Abstract

In the modern and globalized world in which we live at this moment, people are moving all over the world, the rate of international marriage increases and the children with mixed cultural backgrounds are not strange as were before. One of the most frequent and strong desires of these internationalized families is the maintenance of their heritage languages and the cultures. However, various studies show the difficulties these families face, mainly because of the decline of opportunities to use the heritage language, and consequently its development is slowed or even stopped considerably. In addition, the linguistic competence of a language is not based on the improvement of a language itself only, but also on the culture and society of the heritage language. How can we increase the opportunities for the children with heritage languages to study the languages as well as experience the culture? In this work, the case of visiting enrollment at a Japanese primary school will be presented and analyzed descriptively to learn from this case. Though the implementation of such educational opportunity in different settings might be very challenging, this example will be able to offer a new model for the maintenance and strengthening of heritage language education.