Developing CAI materials for education of Nikkei children residing in Japan

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Brazilian-Japanese children in Japanese elementary and secondary schools are said to be experiencing learning difficulty. In the present research project it was hypothesized that these children would benefit from the CAI courseware if they were given the mother language version of the CAI courseware that have proved to greatly increase Japanese school children's understanding and achievement.The project was carried out in the following sequence : 1)The original Japanese arithmetic courseware was translated into three languages(English, Portuguese(Brazilian), and Spanish) by native speakers. The courseware materials were made in each of these languages along with Japanese (referred to as 'translated version'). 2)The translated version was tried with a few children with each language background to make necessary revision. 3)35 children at School A in Toyoda, Aichi were given the translated version to study with it.The following are the finding. i)The homeroom teachers reported that when … More the Brazilian - Japanese children worked with the original CAI courseware(in Japanese), they showed the similar positire attitude toward the material and worked very actively just as other Japanese classmates, even though it took much longer to work through the material. ii)When the Brazilian - Japanese children were made to work with the translated version (in Brazilian and Japanese), a) all the first and second graders rejected it and did not study, b) the third and fourth graders did not reject but worked very reluctantly, and c) one of the two fifth graders who had studied in Brazil up to the fourth grade showed much interest in the courseware and worked willingly, while the other worked reluctantly.All Brazilian - Japanese children except one were not competent in Brazilian. In their daily life they mostly use Japanese. However, due to their bilingual family background, they lack fluency in Japanese. Also, their home - study patterns including adult support seem to be different from ordinary Japanese families. These two are considered to be the cause of learning difficulty of Brazilian - Japanese children. Less