In Japan, where the number of foreign residents is increasing rapidly, how are migrant children whose mother tongue is not Japanese learning their mother tongue and Japanese at school? We call them CLD (Culturally Linguistically Diverse) children (Cummins, 1991).
This book is the result of the first evidence-based, longitudinal eight-year research study in Japan in the field of language education for CLD children, an empirical study of the bilingual acquisition process involving the same group of CLD children with Chinese background over a six-year period.
The book points out some of the difficulties facing Japanese public schools and presents the results of research on the bilingual performances of CLD children throughout the years. We explain the assessment tool developed and used for the research, originally based on the OBC (Oral Proficiency Assessment for Bilingual Children, CAJLE 2000). Later it became part of the DLA (Dialogic Language Assessment, 2014), which was officially developed by a team at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies as a project commissioned by MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology-Japan).
This book supports the transformative pedagogy articulated by Cummins (2016) to see emergent bilingual children as as…

本書は教育研究の枠を超え、言葉の狭間で揺れ動く子供たちの生の軌跡を克明に描き出した、極めて情熱的なドキュメントです。八年にわたる追跡調査という膨大な時間が、単なる統計データの裏側にある子供たちの葛藤や魂の成長を、血の通った物語として浮かび上がらせています。多文化共生という言葉の深淵に迫るその筆致は、読み手の教育観を根底から揺さぶる力に満ちています。 言語習得を単なる技術の問題とせず、自己のアイデンティティを再構築する「変容」のプロセスとして捉える視座こそが、本作の真骨頂です。公立学校という制度の壁に挑み、子供たちの可能性を萌芽的な才能として祝福しようとする著者の真摯な眼差しは、真の共生社会とは何かを私たちに問いかけます。混迷する現代日本において、未来を切り拓く希望の光を放つ一冊と言えるでしょう。