[in Japanese]

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The purpose of this study was to examine the child’s lives in the context of Umwelt (self-centered world) theory. The subjects were a boy (born on January 6, 2014) trying to wear shoes on the terrace of the day nursery, and five cases were observed between January 28 and April13, 2016 (the boy’s age: 24-27 months). The main results are as follows: 1) The boy wore shoes in two places. The first case is to try to operate the shoes in a more stable posture by putting on the shoes on the terrace, and the second case is to move to the edge of the terrace and operate the shoes on the ground. 2) Two types of shoe lifting height were observed, the first type was the shoe lifted high and the upper body bent backward, the second type was the shoe lifted low and the upper body bent forward, so that it was not necessary to raise the feet high, and toes were successfully thrust into the shoe. 3) Cases were observed in which the upper of the shoe was grasped and the sole of the shoe was grasped to push in the heel. As a discussion, it was suggested that the boy’s Umwelt can be reconstructed by changing the circle connecting the infants and the objects involved in the daily life.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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The Japanese new national core curriculum for basic education started in 2020, in which foreign language education is introduced in the third year of schooling. Echoing to this movement, there are pressing needs to educate teachers who can teach a foreign language to young children and to start language learning as early as in kindergarten. The aim of this study is to investigate foreign language education and teacher training for it in Finland, the country where many of the people can speak several foreign languages. Especially, this study focuses on one teacher training program in Finland that aims to educate classroom teachers to teach English as a foreign language. The findings indicated that the program is carefully organized to promote students’ intelligent thinking and professional identity, which further reinforce their teacher agency. The courses emphasize more on diversity and multicultural and multilingual education rather than how to teach English. The findings would be beneficial for developing foreign language education and teacher training in Japan.

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