One hundred years of Japanese immigration in Brazil: the Japanese as a foreign language / Cem anos de imigração japonesa no Brasil: o japonês como ensino de língua estrangeira

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the teaching of the Japanese language has developed during the one hundred years that the Japanese people have been in Brazil. To better apprehend our object of study, we based our research on two elements: historical and linguistic grounds, favoring the teachers viewpoints, by means of their oral reports and evidentiary sources. From a historical point of view, the teaching of Japanese, within the Brazilian context, started out as an immigration language at its beginning (1908-1941), which was the mother tongue of the descendants; during the period after World War II, it was taught as the inheritance language of bilingual descendants; and nowadays it is being taught as a foreign language. For the linguistic analysis, we interviewed working teachers which enabled us to map the linguistic occurrences in order to prepare a linguistic databank. In order to carry out our linguistic analysis, we based ourselves on theories of secondlanguage acquisition and learning, bilingualism foundations, the study of languages in contact, and on earlier papers on the Japanese language spoken within the Nikkei community. We verified that in terms of linguistic view, there is a spectrum of occurrences that ranges from grammatical accuracy to social-linguistic competence in terms of language varieties, both native and non-native ones. Our results have led us to conclude that in historical terms, the Japanese language has not been taught or learned as a foreign language within the Japanese-Brazilian community, nor has research in the area of teaching thrived within the academic milieu. As the teaching of the Japanese language spreads, even among nondescendants, research should be done on the spoken language of native and non-native teachers with the aim of enhancing linguistic competence, be it through courses to perfect teachers linguistic skills, didactic books specially devised for Brazilian students or bilingual grammar books, all of which will entail new conceptions of teaching and learning better suited to Brazilian learnersneeds.

ASSUNTO(S)

língua de herança língua japonesa community school japanese language língua estrangeira foreign language error analysis escola comunitária análise de erros heritage language

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