Paper short abstract:

This study shows the linguistic and cognitive development of 131 elementary school children in both Japanese and their home language, either Chinese or South American Spanish. These data are part of series of our study in the last twelve years, focusing on the CLD children (Cummins, 2014) in Japan.

Paper long abstract:

The number of Japanese living abroad exceeded 1.3 million (MEXT, 2016) and that of foreigners in Japan is 2.23 million (MOJ, 2016), and both numbers are record high at the time of globalization. As the number of the Culturally Linguistically Diverse (CLD) children (Cummins, 2011) has also been rapidly increasing in Japan and abroad, it is important to pay attention to their linguistic and cognitive development in both their home language and Japanese, keeping in mind that they are different from adult learners. Our research group has conducted series of both qualitative and quantitative studies on their overall language development during the past twelve years in Japan.

We present a study focused on the "speaking" skill, which is the foundation of the entire language development of children, and the purpose of the study is to show some developmental features and relationship of the two languages as they grow older.

Subjects of the study consist of 131 of 1st to 6th graders whose home language is either Chinese or South American Spanish, and 58 Japanese native children as the control group. Three tasks of different cognitive requirements were selected for this study from the "Dialogic Language Assessment" (MEXT, 2014). We changed the recorded data to the monadic format, and then analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively.

Strong relationship with age and the two languages was found in their grasping causality and perceiving conceptual framework.　Although the results showed that the clear age distinction was not found in terms of the discourse patterns and the amount of utterance, younger children were found that they could not often generate a discourse and just utter single sentences. Such a tendency in CLD children appeared in both languages in the similar way. Our data will describe their development of two languages.