Niko Catharine Watanabe Schultz

Studies of English education in Japan tend to assume that all learners share Japanese as their first language. In today’s increasingly diverse Japan, however, this is not necessarily the case. The present study examines student and teacher language use in online English lessons taught by the author to two Brazilian junior high school students in Japan. One student, who was born and raised in Japan, seemed to have Japanese as a dominant language and to experience heritage language anxiety with respect to Portuguese. The other, who was born and raised in Brazil and immigrated to Japan three years prior to data collection, had Portuguese as her dominant language. The students and teacher were observed to adjust their uses of their language repertoires in response to each other. In light of these findings, the implications for translanguaging pedagogy in Japan are considered.