I know there was a recent issue of
The Japan Times with an interesting article about English teaching in Japan and the planned changes, with input from people who had a variety of opinions. I can't find it searching their website, though, but they always have a lot of articles about teaching English in Japan, so I thought I'd post snippets and links so you could check some of them out and maybe we could discuss one or more of them next week.
"Why do English teachers have to be native speakers?" covers foreign English teachers who themselves learned the language.
While Indian teachers have gradually gained acceptance, instructors from the Philippines are now working toward the same goal. Like many Indians, the majority of Filipinos begin learning English at the age of 3, and most school subjects are taught in English.
At RareJob.com, a new online English tutoring service offering lessons via Skype, the Internet-phone and video-communication service, all of the teachers are Filipino students or graduates of the University of the Philippines in Manilla. Although RareJob's instructors are first screened and then required to complete a training program, CEO Tomohisa Kato admits that many students are skeptical at first.
"Japanese have a kind of prejudice against Filipinos, but once they started our service, they found that they are very good at English, welcoming and professional," Kato explains.
I did see one questionable remark in the article, though.
language testing is dominated by American exams such the TOEIC test
I don't believe the listening test for TOEIC uses only native speaking accents, and I'm almost sure the TOEFL test doesn't. I couldn't find listening practice on the Internet, but in looking for it I found
a good set of tips for TOEIC. I hope they are useful for you.
"Shame over poor English level lies with education ministry" is part of a series of columns where people get to talk back to the bureaucrats. It was written by a Japanese who teaches English. He places the blame on the Education Ministry as a whole, but fails to take into account divisions within the Education Ministry.
You may argue, "But the ministry of education hires thousands of native English speakers to teach English communication to the kids." This may be true, but because of the all-important entrance exams, which stress grammar and reading, even if there were time for communicative practice, the students and parents want teachers to focus on what is going to be on the next exam because it will determine the child's future school and most likely the child's future career.
The weight given to the entrance exams — and the system of clearly dividing schools into separate academic levels and allowing little room for a student to change his/her school/eventual career path — have created an out-of-touch bureaucracy and a cultural attitude of hopelessness.
I often hear other teachers say, "Those people in the ministry have no idea what it's like in the public sector or how to solve problems in state schools because they all went to the best private schools in Japan." This fundamental problem means that the ministry of education lacks understanding of what the public wants students to be taught, as well as how to teach students effectively.
All this may be true, but to blame the secondary education section of the Ministry for the insistence by the tertiary education section that all universities must write their own entrance exams seems to me to be displaced. The Center Test does, after all, include a listening section, although it is unfortunately only in US Network Standard English.
University EFL hiring: garbage in, garbage out focuses on the hiring of unqualified teachers at the university level. I applaud the author's concern that university teachers have some training and credentials, but I wonder if the problem is limited to English.
How does one become a EFL instructor at a Japanese university? In my experience many Japanese university administrators cannot speak English and view the whole hiring process as just too much trouble. Consequently, most instructors are hired because they are acquainted with an instructor who is working at a particular university.
The cronyism (i.e., favoritism shown to friends and associates) demonstrated at most universities in Japan almost certainly reduces intellectual debate and hampers institutional growth, thus guaranteeing a lower general standard of English education for students.
Basically, as long as the person "looks" the part, they can become a university English instructor in Japan. Background checks are almost never carried out. In the past, foreign "professors" have been found not to even have undergraduate degrees. In addition to some instructors having no master's degree, which is a prerequisite for having a university teaching job in the West, some instructors have masters that are not language- or teaching- related. Such people are, nevertheless, teaching language courses or are teaching classes unrelated to their masters (e.g., MBAs teaching conversation and writing classes).
This was responded to in a letter
More to EFL hiring than 'garbage in, garbage out' It might be worth noting that Amanda Ripley, in her piece in The Atlantic on primary and secondary education in the U.S., points out that education degrees do not necessarily produce good teaching in American schools. I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true with regard to Japanese universities.
While Tharn is right that some of us teachers are unqualified impostors who got through the door too quickly or easily, he's wrong when he says that the "calculation is a simple one" or that teachers with degrees unrelated to ESL, literature or education are garbage.
While it is true that Japan has a very shoddy higher education system with its fair share of shoddy teachers, the perspectives of people from many disciplines, not the least of which is the study of business, can prove effective in the classroom.
Another article from the same series is
"Look overseas to address Japan's lag in English ability" Japan seems to be the only country in the world where high school English-language textbooks are full of the native language of the learners. Japanese language in high school textbooks is used for various explanations and also for giving commands and instructions for what the students are required to do in a given section. Never has this author encountered a Japanese high school textbook where the learners are given a command or instruction in English. In comparison, high school English textbooks from other non-English countries such as China, France, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia contain absolutely no Chinese, French, Urdu or Arabic, respectively, and give all commands and instructions in English alone.
As a result of the use of such methods and tools, Japanese high school students are not accustomed to hearing English or to being given commands in English to do specific tasks.
In other words, Japan is perhaps the only country still using grammar translation methods to teach a living language.
Finally, a little time for Japan Times columnist Gregory Clark, not because I agree with his ideas or even think he knows what he's taking about (although even a broken clock is right twice a day, and I wouldn't disagree with everything he says here) but because he does seem to be very influential.
It's back to school in Japan, and back to the perennial questions:
• How to find enough teachers able properly to handle English-language classes in primary schools? (Answer: nearly impossible.)
• How to improve foreign-language education generally? (Cut back on high school teaching and concentrate intensive advanced teaching on those who really want it — at university level.)
Some
background on Mr. Clark's university and its foreign language instruction is available at the Chronicle of Higher Education, a newspaper from the United States which covers university education around the world. They also have some articles that refer to the university, but you couldn't read them without subscribing to the magazine. Sorry.
update July 6, 2010
We were talking about this topic in class and I mentioned my own contribution to the debate. I wrote an article for the Japan Times, to which they gave the headline
"Lay off the linguistics to address English lag", in which I argued that the tendency of Japanese linguistics to argue over transformational grammar, combined with the insistence of the Ministry that English teachers be trained in Linguistics, was in part responsible for the poor standard of English instruction and ability in Japan. I suppose it's worth adding to the discussion.
