Multilingual literacies in Japan: Children’s project work in a community language school

Economic immigration to Japan has increased the number of language minority students in certain Japanese elementary schools to as many as one in four. Little is known, however, about how these children are influencing language and literacy practices in schools. This article looks at the classroom interaction in the International Community School (ICS), a small school run by a Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) in Gunma Prefecture in which the presence of English‑, Portuguese‑, and Japanese-speaking children has given rise to an experiment in trilingual education. A project to create world globes in a first-grade trilingual classroom is examined using a social semiotic framework. The physical characteristics of the globes bear traces of the political and linguistic environment as well as the organization and management of the school. Children and teachers in turn question and transform geographic systems of representation and approaches to literacy in the process of creating and using a multilingual globe to talk about interests, experiences, and knowledge related to the world.