Paper short abstract:

The author reports on the practice and validity of introducing the teaching method of translingaging to heritage Japanese learners in a heritage Japanese school.

Paper long abstract:

The author reports on the practice and validity of introducing the teaching method of translingaging (TL) to heritage Japanese learners in a heritage Japanese school.

With regard to TL, Kano (2016) stated that multilingual children are limited in what they can understand in the target language alone and cannot make full use of their existing knowledge, and that allowing children to use all language resources and ensuring deep understanding while adjusting cognitive load will improve the quality of target language output and lead to advanced cognitive activity.

The author introduced the theory of active learning acquisition proposed by Watanabe (2020) into the overall planning of learning. His educational theory describes an image of autonomous citizens who support democracy, citizens with open ideas and critical reason, who can question social rules and frameworks themselves through democratic debate. He presents a learning model with research work at its core and four categories: presentation, discussion/debate and drama work.

The target group for this practical learning was 12-14 year old children living in Europe and in the classroom the TL teaching method was introduced in a series of activities from research to presentation and discussion of Watabe's learning model. The expressive activities were carried out in a learning plan that followed a planned learning process with controlled use of several languages. The sequence of activities consisted of (1) research (in multiple languages), (2) research writing (in Japanese), (3) presentation (in Japanese), (4) discussion (in multiple languages), (5) reading other children's writing (in multiple languages), and (6) feedback and writing elaboration (in Japanese). In this report, we would like to compare TL learning in two different classes and suggest the validity and future challenges of the TL teaching method for heritage Japanese learners.