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This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n=28) and parent (n=67) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a Japanese–English bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis was conducted to derive three underlying CALE components, each representing educational intervention strategies. These three components were comprised of primary loadings that depict the respective aspects of the Japanese transnational experience with their children's supplementary education during their overseas sojourns and reveal families' needs for: L1 maintenance communities, L2 acquisition support, and a means to convert their children's bilingual skills into academic credentials that are adequate for both L1 and L2 contexts. Principal components were thus interpreted as sojourning families' three approaches to environmental structuring: a Japanese Cultural Community Approach, a Quasi-Bilingual Approach, and a Japanese Test-oriented Approach. Implications are drawn, both for the sojourning community and for future research needs.
