REFORM OF JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION
with an emphasis on self-control, modesty, reassurance, and perfectionism (factors
that when combined prioritize the written text over verbal communication and
makes for taciturn students in the language classroom), 3) an attitude of
ethnocentrism among native Japanese speakers, 4) a lack of both perceived and
actual need for foreign languages, 5) and little support for maintenance of
language skills after schooling, leading to a wide-scale attrition of language skills.
Although these hurdles for ELT in Japan parallel factors that hamper second-
language learning in other monolingual societies such as Britain or the U.S. (see
Holliday 1994; Thornbury 1998), there is a widespread belief in Japan, held by the
person on the street and the education expert alike, that ELT has failed. Brian
McVeigh sums up this belief nicely: “If English teaching at the pretertiary level is a
disaster …, it is at the tertiary level that English education becomes peculiar, with
inverted, simulated ideas and practices that actually sabotage English learning”
(McVeigh 2002b, p. 157).
The changes in university language programs, and the HE curricula in general,
reflect recent societal pressures in Japan. In the past, there was little pressure to
reform the curriculum. A buyer’s market, however, has forced universities to
seriously reconsider “the product.” Not only are admissions offices scrambling to
find new customers, but administrators and faculty are also beginning to recognize
an equally crucial issue of retention of students, as discussed above. This has led to
a culture in some universities of faculty development and in others of parallel
extension programs. EUC decided to go the road of FD in an attempt to improve
their HE “product.”
ELT at Japanese Universities
The numerous descriptions and explanations of the poor state of English education
in Japan usually emphasize how “the poor English abilities of students are rooted
in pretertiary-level training” (McVeigh 2002b, p. 157). Many of these critical
descriptions, though accurate, do not necessarily explain the changes that have
taken place in ELT at Japanese universities over the past 50 years (Terauchi 1996,
2001; Wadden 1993). Though admittedly inadequate in scope and only effecting
incremental change
1
, nevertheless, there have been legitimate attempts to reform
tertiary-level English education in Japan. These changes to some degree parallel
larger changes in applied linguistic and language teaching theory worldwide. As
briefly noted above, much of the explanation of failure in English-language
training in Japan has often been based on arguments that are culturally specific in
nature. Certainly the sociocultural context of ELT must be paramount in any
analysis. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Poole 2001, 2005b), the
shortcomings of the reforms at the tertiary level may in fact reflect more upon the
sociocultural realities of the institutional milieu of ELT at HEIs worldwide, a
smaller culture of the ELT classroom, than on the larger culture of Japanese
peculiarities.
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CHAPTER 2
As Aspinall describes (2005), most university admissions exams include a
compulsory English proficiency subtest, although English as a foreign language
(EFL) is not a state-required subject at primary, secondary, and tertiary schools in
Japan. Partly because of this, university entrance exam focus on English, while
only a handful of students are exposed to language classes in primary school, over
10 million 12- to- 18-year-olds and another million or so university students have
no choice but to study English. Not only is English a requirement to enter
university, most students study the subject at some point during their four years of
attendance. Nearly all tertiary institutions offer foreign language courses, and EFL
is by far the most studied subject of these. In fact, although students sometimes
have a choice of different English classes from which to choose, EFL in some form
is a required subject at nearly every tertiary institution in Japan. In fact, the nature
of the English language-teaching milieu at Japanese universities corresponds
closely to Holliday’s description of a worldwide phenomenon he has defined as
Tertiary English and Secondary English Programs, or TESEP (Holliday 1994).
These TESEP attributes include: 1) EFL is a part of a wider curriculum and
influenced by institutional imperatives; 2) ELT has a role alongside other subjects
in socializing students as members of the work community; 3) EFL is but one of
many subjects taught and must work within the parameters and resources that are
limiting factors for all courses; 4) ELT methodology choice is limited by
institution-wide approaches adopted across different subjects as well as by the
expectations of the actors themselves—students, language teachers, teachers of
other subjects, administrators, and MEXT.
In other words, though there are certain peculiarities that exist in Japanese ELT
at HEIs (McVeigh 2002b, pp. 157–158), many of the generalizations that describe
the university context of language teaching and learning may be attributes not
necessarily unique to the Japanese experience but part of a wider phenomenon of
tertiary English programs worldwide. Kubota (1999) has argued, correctly in my
opinion, that observers need to take more care in their evaluations of the Japanese
context, and that there exists an overemphasis of essentialized, stereotypical
“features” of Japanese students in the research literature on ELT. Holliday (1994)
points out a similar danger of assuming too much when he argues that “‘learner’
carries the implication that the only purpose for being in the classroom is to learn
… [while] ‘student’, on the other hand, implies roles and identities outside the
classroom.” Likewise, anthropologists have noted that for many students at HEIs in
Japan, classroom learning is in fact not always the main priority and warn that the
western view of “learner” may not fit with the Japanese model (McVeigh 1997;
Poole 2003b).
One example of the overgeneralizations that are rather common in the ELT
literature is the description of Asian students as “often quiet, shy and reticent in
ESL/EFL classrooms, indicating a reserve that is the hallmark of introverts. These
ethnic groups have a traditional cultural focus on group membership, solidarity and
face-saving, and they de-emphasize individualism (Oxford et al. 1992, p. 445).
While any EFL teacher who has spent time in a Japanese university language
54