The Evolution of English Language Learners in Japan

Crossing Japan, the West, and South East Asia

Yoko Kobayashi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351804561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book seeks a better understanding of the sociocultural and ideological factors that influence English study in Japan and study-abroad contexts such as university-bound high schools, female-dominant English classes at college, ESL schools in Canada, and private or university-affiliated ESL programs in Singapore and Malaysia. The discussion is based not only on data garnered from Japanese EFL learners and Japanese/overseas educators but also on official English language policies and commercial magazine discourses about English study for Japanese people. The book addresses seemingly incompatible themes that are either entrenched in or beyond Japan's EFL context such as: Japan's decades-long poorly-performing English education vs. its equally long-lived status as an economic power; Japanese English learners' preference for native English speakers/norms in at-home Japanese EFL contexts vs. their friendship with other Asian students in western study-abroad contexts; Japanese female students' dream of using English to further their careers vs. Japanese working women's English study for self-enrichment; Japanese society's obsession with globalization through English study vs. the Japanese economy sustained by monolingual Japanese businessmen; Japanese business magazines' frequent cover issues on global business English study vs. Japanese working women's magazines' less frequent and markedly feminized discourses about English study.

1
Japan’s English education and students’ notions about English study

Japan’s poor English education: unintended result or institutionalized policy?

The English education in Japan from the 1970s to the 2000s attracted Japanese and international scholars’ attention, all wondering why it could go amiss for such a long time. A leading western anthropologist of Japanese schooling (Rohlen, 1983, 1995) differentiates trouble-ridden English education from Japan’s educational ‘success’:

On the other hand, Japanese accomplishments in language arts, critical thinking, foreign language instruction, and civics are topics much debated and rarely if ever praised. As far as these subjects are concerned, Japan could do much better and benefit from adopting practices common in other countries.

(Rohlen, 1995, p. 106)

A professor of Keio University is also among many others who lamented Japan’s ineffective English education, although, similar to many other researchers including Rohlen (1995), he cared less about the mismatch between a robust economy and unpraised English education. In 1974 when an unprecedented amount of Japanese cars and manufactured products were expanding into the US and other overseas markets, he deplored in his ELT Journal article: “Of all the countries in the world where English has been taught on a nationwide scale, Japan seems to me about [sic] the least successful” and “the time and energy our students devote to English is mostly wasted” (Harasawa, 1974, p. 71). He then points out some “grave defects” in Japan’s English education policy and practice: (1) the university entrance examination in which “English is treated as if it were as dead a language as Latin”, (2) the undemanding teacher qualification system in which any university student can graduate with a teaching certificate “so long as he obtains during his undergraduate years a certain limited number of credits, coupled with brief and very perfunctory practice in teaching” and (3) “academic prejudice on the part of the teachers” such as professors of English linguistics and British literature who “despise anything practical”, “devote themselves entirely to the pursuit of obscure theories” and exhibit “excessive fondness for hair-splitting discussion of grammatical details [in Japanese]” (pp. 74–75).

More than four decades have passed since the publication of Harasawa (1974) and English education in Japan remains in the doldrums despite the implementation of many national-level policies. Recent policies include the introduction of the English listening comprehension test in the National Center Test for University Admission (2006) and the Course of Study Guidelines’ historical notification calling for the instruction of English in English at senior high schools (2009) and at junior high schools (2016). Most recently, it was approved to start English teaching as a mandatory formal subject for fifth-and sixth-graders in elementary schools, together with the obligatory introduction of English as foreign language activity class for the third-and fourth-graders (2020). Moreover, the National Center Test for University Admission is to be replaced with a new standardized test combined with private-sector tests to measure speaking and writing skills (2020) (e.g., ‘Japan’s new standardized university entrance exam to use private English testing’, The Mainichi Shimbun Online, September 1, 2016).

Although palpable changes have yet to be witnessed in Japanese English learners’ study outcomes, they now start studying practical English at an earlier stage than ever. According to Benesse (2014), a survey that collects data from 6,294 junior and senior school students residing across Japan, more than 90% of junior high schoolers and 70% of senior students have studied English in elementary schools, and approximately 40% of all the surveyed students have engaged in some kind of English study prior to their enrollment in elementary schools, whether at English conversation schools (48 to 59.4%), at exam-preparatory schools (32 to 41.7%), in kindergarten or at nursery schools (9.6 to 15.4%), through correspondence education (8.1 to 12.6%), and so on (pp. 4–5). Moreover, English lessons taught primarily in Japanese are now in the minority at junior high schools and senior high schools (5.8% in 1st grade junior English class, 15.7% in the 3rd grade senior high English class). On the other hand, English classes taught predominantly in English (70 to 100%) are not the mainstream yet either (25.8% in 1st grade junior English class, 14% in 3rd grade senior English class).

In the meantime, in the domain of language education research the turn of the new century has witnessed an increased body of ideological analysis of Japan’s seemingly unproductive English education, whether it is deliberately or unintentionally designed and practiced that way. First of all, McVeigh (2006) argues that Japanese nationals’ struggle with English study engenders Japan’s linguistic nationalism and a high degree of allergic resistance to English use:

Japanese are infamous for devoting an inordinate amount of time, money, and effort to learning English with remarkably disappointing results. […] Consequently, they then assume that they themselves, being on the other side of an impenetrable linguistic wall, cannot learn a foreign language […]. According to the logic of Japan’s linguistic nationalism, the Japanese language is to Japaneseness as English is to non-Japaneseness (the linguistic Other par excellence). This is why, to express it in extreme terms, to acquire English is to be contaminated by non-Japaneseness.

(pp. 244–245)

Eight years prior to the publication of McVeigh (2006), Kubota (1998) also construes that many Japanese people’s “English ‘allergy’ and xenophobic attitudes reflect a reaction against excessive or unsuccessful attempts to acquire English and identify with English speakers” (p. 300).

Other scholars contend that the ‘hidden’ goal of Japan’s English education is to cultivate Japanese youth with a sense of national identity, not English skills. Hashimoto (2007), for example, argues that “English is adopted only as a tool so that the values and traditions embedded in the Japanese culture will be retained, and cultural independence will be ensured” (p. 27). Mabuchi (1998, 2002) shares the view that the decades-long failure in English education is constitutive of the Japanese government’s essentialized policy that situates English education as a means of implanting a sense of Japaneseness into pupils who can differentiate we Japanese from the others and are willingly poised to act in accordance with their country’s interests. By the same token, an internationally well-cited Japanese scholar of sociology claims that “cultural nationalism” is inculcated into Japanese pupils within English classrooms where English teachers “often engage in Nihonjinron [theories on Japaneseness]” and “have become reproducers and transmitters of discourses of cultural difference”, comparing Japan only with the Anglo-Saxon English nations (Yoshino, 2002, p. 142).

This line of critical theorization is allied to a pioneering work, Phillipson (1992), in which UK and US governmental and industrial entities are argued to wield their hidden, worldwide power to beguile non-English speakers into the belief that English is a ticket to successful life. Viewed from this type of discussion, Japan’s English education is a great success in producing young monolingual Japanese who are presupposed to ascribe their poor English skills to their pure, genetic, innate Japaneseness and chant: “We Japanese cannot speak English because we are Japanese”.

Undoubtedly, these critical studies have contributed in a profound way to the worldwide discussion on the allegedly institutionalized dominance of English. Acclaiming Phillipson’s (1992) model of linguistic imperialism as one of the “models proposed to explain the role of language and language policies in the shaping of societies around the world”, Ricento (2006) argues that his “provocative and controversial claim has generated a great deal of research and a great many publications, which seek to reaffirm, contest, or recast the original claims within emerging new paradigms” (p. 16).

Furthermore, the expanding scholarly knowledge divulges the complexity of language policy and practice. For example, the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme known as the JET Programme is often cited as one of Japan’s nationalism-driven strategies by inviting western native English speakers as the representatives of ‘ideal whiteness’ to Japanese schools for only three to five years before they start to become accustomed to Japanese language and culture and lose their complete foreignness. McConnell (2000), in a study on the program, points out that by “setting the three-year-limit, Japanese officials were explicitly acknowledging that the ALT [assistant language teachers] and CIR [coordinators of international relations] slots would forever be positions for temporary outsiders” (pp. 103–104).

By shedding light on the origin of the JET Programme, however, McConnell (2000) reveals that its initial purpose was extraneous to Japanese students’ development of Japaneseness. In fact, it was launched in 1978 as a trade friction-driven policy in order to ease Japan’s record-high trade surplus with the US by providing a sizable number of unemployed American university graduates with high-paid, unskilled jobs as English teachers in Japan. One Japanese official who was then in charge of the JET Programme is quoted as admitting: “The main goal was to get local governments to open up their gates to foreigners. It’s basically a grassroots regional development program” (p. 30). This explains why the policy was designed and implemented not by the Ministry of Education but by the then Ministry of Home Affairs which “was by almost any definition one of the least ‘international’ ministries in Japan” (p. 31).

McConnell’s (2000) documentation is in line with the scholarly knowledge of language policy and planning domain (Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997). That is, language planning, implementation and evaluation are often dictated by taken-for-granted, common-sense language ideology and belief, creating a situation where “many politicians (and others who propose ‘language plans’) go about language planning as if it could and should be done only on the basis of their intuitive feelings” (p. 118) and thus “a great deal of language-in-education planning has occurred without any reference to the general stages of language planning” (p. 125).

On the other hand, it is documented that many Japanese citizens’ sense of struggle with English study at school does not always transform them into adults who reproduce the discourse of Japaneseness (e.g., “My children won’t need English because they are Japanese like us and won’t be able to speak English”). A large-scale survey of 4,718 parents of elementary school children across Japan compares those who acknowledged their past struggle with English study (n = 2,652) and those who did not (n = 1,982) (Benesse, 2006). The former group of ‘English struggle’ parents is found to be more concerned with elementary school English education by 11.3% than ‘no English struggle’ parents, and also be more in favor of English teaching as a compulsory subject at elementary schools by 8.4% than other ‘non-struggle’ parents (pp. 47–49). Thus, Japanese parents’ negative evaluation of their study experience at school appears to be offset by the ideology of internationalization, which raises their interest in their children’s English study at school. Although this particular online report based on descriptive statistics does not allow for the assessment of statistical significance, the findings point out the possibility of interplay between Japanese adults’ identification as failed English learners and their increased interest in English education for the younger generation.

Japanese senior high students’ notions about English study

The discussion in the preceding section suggests that current and former Japanese EFL learners’ attitudes toward the language study assume a multifaceted nature and thus cannot be accounted for by one single linear causal argument. Based on this presupposition, the present section addresses Japanese high school students’ evolving notions of English study in the context of Japanese education from the late 1990s to early 2016, in particular in secondary education.

The previously mentioned well-known Japanese educational company, Benesse, regularly conducts educational surveys nationwide and provides free access to its electronic research reports. One of their surveys conducted in the late 1990s examined Japanese students’ perceptions of English and other school subjects by collecting data from 1,718 senior high school students at five schools located in Tokyo, Saitama and Niigata (Benesse, 1998). The respondents chose English as the most important school subject for entrance examinations (54.3%), with math the second (34.2%). Not surprisingly, 61% of the first-year students and 80% of the second-year students demanded that English classes cater to entrance examinations with more grammatical exercises. In the meantime, multidimensional complexities of Japanese senior school students’ conceptualization of English emerged: whereas 93% answered that English study at school would not equip them with English speaking skills, English was chosen as the most useful school subject beyond the school context by 46% of students, followed by home economics (19.6%) and social studies (12.5%).

In the same year of 1998, I myself conducted a questionnaire survey at two university preparatory senior schools, collecting numerical data from 555 students and written responses from 66 of them. The findings project the students’ ambivalent, multifaceted, and diverse attitudes toward English situated in both inside and outside school contexts. First of all, many students positively answered that they were studying English not only as a formal subject required for university preparation but also as an international language used around the world:

I have never thought that I am studying English for the sake of the juken [university entrance examinations]. English is the language spoken by people around the world, so I can communicate with them if I can speak English.

I think I would have studied English even if it were not a juken eigo [English tested in university admission tests] because I like English, it is the era of internationalization, and it is good for me to learn English.

Overlapping with Benesse’s (1998) findings, many students believe in the usefulness of English as a school subject beyond the classroom. Some students with a more affirmative belief remarked that juken eigo, or English tested in university admission tests, is not independent of eigo or English used around the world and that English study at school contributes to the development of their English proficiency.

I think what we are learning at school is useful. Juken eigo is a part of eigo and juken eigo’s grammar is useful for learning English conversations or correct English usage.

I think juken eigo is useful. I am learning the basics of eigo and I feel more confident in speaking English a little.

In fact, a more critical view of juken eigo was rather an opinion of the minority:

Juken eigo is of no practical use. We cannot speak English and we can only write something on a piece of paper. I am very sure that juken eigo is useless.

I am studying English now for the sake of juken because we cannot speak English even though we studied it for six years at junior and sen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 Japan’s English education and students’ notions about English study
• 2 Internationalizing Japan with the help of its Asian neighbors
• 3 A new alternative of studying English in English-speaking ASEAN nations
• 4 Japanese female students’ positive attitudes toward language study
• 5 Japanese (fe)male learners’ (un)motivation in overseas ESL contexts
• 6 The mismatch between Japan’s strong economy and poor English education
• 7 Japanese business magazines’ special issues on English study methods: a window on the division between Japan’s business world and formal schooling
• 8 Japanese women’s magazines’ articles about English study: a window on Japanese women’s status in the business world
• Afterword
• Index