As a PhD student currently revising my doctoral dissertation, I can’t help but feel in a state of transition. After balancing full-time employment with graduate studies for the past seven years, it is with no small amount of satisfaction (and relief!) that I will soon shed the label of ‘student’. But where to now? And how to get there? These two rhetorical questions underpin my motives for applying for the ALMA 2010 Award. In this short essay, I will outline the work I am currently undertaking, and also offer my vision for how I would like to extend this work into the future.

I am currently revising my doctoral thesis entitled “Bilingual child-rearing in linguistic intermarriage”. This work is a qualitative sociolinguistic study that investigates the parental experiences of bilingual child-rearing for linguistically intermarried couples in Japan. In particular, it focuses on the role of the fathers, who are the minority language speaking parents in all of my case studies. This is a perspective that has, to date, been inadequately theorized in the existing literature. Through the incorporation of questionnaire, logbook, and in-depth interview data, my doctoral work presents eight unique and richly nuanced cases of language contact in the family domain.

The study builds on influential works that have both questioned the ease with which children acquire two languages (Yamamoto, 2001) and highlighted bilingual child-rearing as a labour-intensive and emotionally demanding pursuit (Okita, 2002).  My work supports the notion that the individual circumstances of couples rarely aligns neatly with the prescriptive advice found in much of the popular literature on how to raise children in two (or more) languages (Piller, 2001). Bilingual child-rearing is shown to be a fluid process of negotiation whereby language choices and decisions about transmission strategies are shown to emerge from each family’s unique and fluctuating set of social circumstances. These include, but are not limited to the quality of the spousal relationship, the family’s economic resources, (shifting) cultural affiliations of all family members, future plans, minority language contact opportunities, the medium of instruction at the child’s school, as well as the agency of the child.

If I were given the opportunity to ‘play’ with the LotM creators for one year, I would seek their input as I explore the bilingual child-rearing experiences other linguistically intermarried couples from non-English speaking backgrounds. Linguistic intermarriage between non-English-speaking migrants and Japanese nationals is increasing, yet such couples remain underrepresented in the existing literature. Given the high status of English in Japan, one can assume that intermarried couples form non-English-speaking backgrounds face different and potentially more complex issues than the English speaking couples typified in many of the previous studies. Initially therefore, I intend to conduct a pilot study on Iranian-Japanese couples. The LotM creators’ input and advice in this project would be of great value to me. In short, I want to ‘take the next step’, and I think the way to do this is to engage constructively with as many talented and creative researchers as I can.

HOW MY WORK RELATES TO LANGUAGE ON THE MOVE AND HOW IT WOULD BE ENHANCED BY ALMA:

My work on linguistic intermarriage in Japan relates directly to LotM in that it perceives language use as social practice. Also, Japan is very much a country that is ‘on the move’ because the demographic imperatives it faces render questions pertaining to such things as increased immigration, language policies, as well as shifting national and cultural identities increasingly pressing.
As a remote location student, I feel that ALMA would give my work the opportunity for wider input and a greater airing than it has, as yet, received. That’s what I need to take my “next step”.