This dissertation study explores a young Japanese heritage language speaker's learning process of formal writing in Japanese. With a rapid increase in immigrants into the U.S. and growing importance of diversity, many researchers have shown interest in immigrant children, i.e., heritage speakers, from educational and research perspectives and have…

This study explores a Japanese-Korean-English trilingual Asian-American child's identity negotiation in a multicultural book club. Drawing upon the conception of "figured world" (Holland et al. 1998. "Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), it investigates how the book club as "a…

This study investigated culturally authentic representations and perspectives on historical events and political issues presented in children's picture books on Japanese culture. Our analysis of the representation of Japanese culture in the texts and illustrations was based on a sample of 37 children's picture books written in English or…

Learning a heritage language can be celebrated to enhance marginalized groups' self-esteem, but a heritage can also encompass ideologies prevalent in the groups' original homeland. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2007-2011) at a weekend Japanese-language school in the United States, this article investigates how ideologies on race politics…

The strength of English learners' second language reading is closely associated with academic success. Using qualitative research methods and verbal protocols, this study examines four elementary-level English learners' uses of reading strategies and describes how each English learner employs these strategies while reading both culturally relevant…

This qualitative study investigates immigrant mothers' beliefs and practices toward supporting maintenance of their children's heritage language (HL) in the context of transnationalism. The data are primarily drawn from formal and informal interviews and observations of six mothers who immigrated to the United States from Japan and Korea. The…

This article explores citizenship's multiple meanings in Los Angeles by describing five different types of Americanization, or immigrant education, in the city of angels from 1910 to 1940. The federal racialization of access to citizenship influenced these alternative approaches to Americanization at a local level. In the context of Supreme Court…

This study adds to the research on the education of Asian immigrant adolescents by situating how generation, language, nationality, and race complexly impacted how a group of 1.5-generation Japanese youth have made sense of their multiple "non-dominant" identities as immigrant Americans and transnational students within an urban high…

Building upon paradigms of language and languaging practices as "local" phenomena (Canagarajah, 2013; Pennycook, 2010, Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes, 2013), this paper narrates a teacher's experience in an undergraduate seminar in applied language studies as an exploration in transdisciplinarity-as-localization. Taught by the author in…

The importance of input factors for bilingual children's vocabulary development was investigated. Forty-seven Argentine, 42 South Korean, 51 European American, 29 Latino immigrant, 26 Japanese immigrant, and 35 Korean immigrant mothers completed checklists of their 20-month-old children's productive vocabularies. Bilingual children's vocabulary…

This article documents the heritage-language (HL) literacy practices of three Japanese American families residing in a predominantly Anglo and Latino community. Through interviews and observations, this study investigates Japanese children's HL-literacy practices, parental attitudes toward HL literacy, and challenges in HL-literacy development in…

The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like…

This article examines how "Nisei," the second generation of Japanese immigrants, in Hilo on the island of Hawai'i have maintained their Japanese cultural and linguistic skills. In this article, the author first provides a history of these Japanese immigrant communities in Hilo. This article describes the author's research findings. The…

For a number of years, Kent Sakoda has been teaching at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in the Department of Second Language Studies. His course, "Pidgin and Creole English in Hawai'i," is popular among students on campus. He has also taught at Hawai'i Pacific University. Because of his expertise on the grammar of Pidgin (Hawai'i…