Parents’ Impact Belief in Raising Bilingual and Biliterate Children in Japan

Abstract

Impact belief is the conviction that parents have that they can affect their children’s language development (De Houwer, 1999). This paper investigates how parents’ impact belief is shaped and how it transpires into language management which supports the bilingual and biliterate development of children in exogamous families. Interviews with eight English-speaking parents raising English-Japanese bilingual children in Tokyo, Japan were analyzed using the constructive grounded approach (Charmaz, 2014). The results revealed that the parents’ impact belief was influenced by their individual experiences, the support of their Japanese spouses, and peer influence. Specifically, it was positively affected by other parents with older bilingual children. The parents’ impact belief was also strengthened by their involvement in ‘communities of practice,’ i.e., English playgroup and weekend school. Their strong impact belief led to language management efforts which included their insistence on their children speaking English and the regular practice of home literacy activities.

Raising Bilingual Children: an Exploration of Language Ideology and its Practices in an Indonesian Family

“…Apart from that, parents in this study also assumed that there were some factors to motivate them to form bilingual children such as the changing times from old, millennial to hyper millennial era, individual's experience, parents' colleague, and support from extended family. In line with this, there was a result study concerning parental ideology in shaping bilingual children in Japan, Nakamura (2019) found that parents' belief was affected by peer and individual experience, the support of Japanese spouse and strengthened by the involvement of practice in society. Besides that, this bilingual family has an open mindset that is different from the old paradigm to sight how to promote the language ability of children and be prepared their children's language skills to face a sophisticated era in the future.…”

“…Furthermore, one of the important things of the three components of FLP is ideology or belief that will have an impact on parents' actions in home language management. So that, parents must have a positive belief to support children's language development (Nakamura, 2019).…”

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“…Choe [197] pointed out to a translator that can refer to the unfamiliar emotional language used in the original text also such topics as child murder and mental illness. Nakamura [198] explained that strong parental beliefs about the importance of language development led them to insist on raising bilingual children who speak a specific language and also practice their home literacy activities regularly.…”