Teaching Japanese as a Community Language in Australia: Insights from Educators and their Beliefs.

Japanese as a community language (JCL) schools represent one of the largest Japanese migrant communities in Australia. The backgrounds of the migrant families attending these schools are increasingly diverse, and JCL schools tend to find it challenging to cater to their diversity. This challenge is related to educators’ beliefs and language ideologies underlying these beliefs. This chapter examines the beliefs of educators at JCL schools and how these beliefs relate to the challenges and issues that they face. An analysis of interviews with 16 managers and 18 teachers at JCL schools reveals the three types of beliefs, including a Japanese-only teaching ethos and an aspiration to make class learning enjoyable. It also found that the Kokugo ideology underlying the ethos appears to deprive some children of their opportunity to learn in class by not allowing them to utilise various resources in their linguistic repertoire. This chapter also discusses how some teachers successfully respond to this issue by incorporating translanguaging practice.