The English language learning situation in Japanese high schools.

There are many armchair critics, including myself, of the way English is taught in the Japanese education system. They have heaped praise or criticism without any actual experience themselves. These bystander comments usually sensationalise the situation without any critics questioning the validity and reliability of their comments.

Well, my one or two readers, I now have that continuing experience to verify some of those claims, and some of them are uncomfortably true.

Disclaimer: I can only give 100% reliable evidence from one school, but I know from other teachers that most of the information I will state is applicable to most schools.

What is an A.L.T.?

Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) is the standard title given to a "native" English speaker in the school environment. I understand that there are many interpretations of the term "native speaker", but unofficially in Japan it refers to a citizen from the UK and Ireland, Canada, USA, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. There are many points to contest in this information alone (e.g. the ability to actually speak English well), but this is the way it is classified here and it will not change soon.

An ALT usually has a degree from a university, but in many cases an employer in Japan will not specify what kind of degree is necessary. You could quite possibly gain employment as an English teacher with a degree in mechanical engineering. I am not going to criticise this because I entered Japan the first time in this method with a Bachelor degree in Science (anatomy, pharmacology and physiology majors). However, if you are suddenly enthusiastic about trying to become an ALT now, be prepared to brush up on English grammar terms (e.g. present perfect, infinitives and gerunds, and conditionals) and the ability to bluff your way through explanations like the difference between "going to" and "will".

There are subtleties with the role of an ALT in schools, however as the name implies it is an "assistant". This means that he/she will be assisting a Japanese-national English teacher in the classroom with roles like "repeat after me..." CD-style repetition, and the leader in group activities or games. These classes usually involve a certain amount of Japanese language explanations that are predominantly concerned with grammar.

In some cases though, this name is incorrectly applied to certain teacher's role. Ok, I am talking about myself. I am sometimes referred to as an ALT, however I do not assist any teachers at all - I teach every class by myself. The reason I am sometimes labeled as this is because the past teacher had a different role and .... anyway, it boils down to pure laziness and a lack of understanding of the acronym. I let everyone know I am not that whenever I hear it.

Eigo 英語 (えいご) vs Eikaiwa 英会話 (えいかいわ)

There are a variety of styles of English language learning in schools, but they are most commonly classified as either an eigo 英語 ("ay-go") or eikaiwa 英会話 ("ay-kye-wa") class. Eigo translates to "the English language", while eikaiwa translates to "English conversation class".

I have experience teaching eikaiwa (English conversation) in both the corporate environment, at both an enormous and very small company, and teaching eikaiwa at my current high and junior high school. My classes are all in English and are designed to increase the students' experience at listening to and speaking in English.

I do not have any experience teaching eigo (English language) at all. If you have no knowledge of the industry in Japan, this may sound baffling. It may surprise you to hear that eigo teachers at school are usually (95% of the time) Japanese nationals that teach English in predominantly the Japanese language. But this is actually not that different to teachers of other languages in English speaking countries when you think about it. After all, I taught Japanese in Australia. So, I am not going to be critical of this fact.

Now, this is where it gets complicated. There is a national curriculum that teachers must abide by, but this isn't really revealed or explicitly discussed as much as my experience in Australia. The reason is that there are government-approved textbooks that have all of the essential elements of the curriculum contained within. So, teachers just teach straight from the one textbook and workbook. From what I have seen, there are only a few textbooks to choose from, so a teacher from one end of the country will be able to compare notes with a teacher at the other end. The publishers must be making a fortune.

It is actually classified even further than that though. At high school, an eigo (English) teacher can either teach the inappropriately named "English communication" class (コミュニケーション英語), or an "English practice drills" class (英語演習). The "English practice drills" class mainly focuses on reading or writing repetitive drills of a certain grammar point. The "English communication" class... does pretty much the same thing but there is a general context to the lesson e.g. Roman baths of Britain; leap years; iPS cells. Teachers of this class usually take 3-4 weeks to cover one article, but of course that varies. The class analyse the language... no, I am going to say words and grammar only (I'll explain later)... without much concern for the semantics or the application of those structures. This is what I am critical of.

The situation is extremely complicated though, and it is all due to the fossilized education system. And by system, I mean not one specific exam, but many steps along the way. Before I get all negative, please remember that I am reasonably optimistic of the system improving... eventually.

When you hear of the Japanese education system being too focused on exams (I said this in my job interview too), well it definitely is. I cannot speak with absolute certainty on other subject areas, so I am naturally going to concentrate on the English language learning area. Tests, tests, tests - that's what it's about. At high school, there are mid-terms and final exams each term, which is pretty standard. But where do they lead to, and what are they testing? Is it assessment for learning or learning for assessment? I think that is always a good debate amongst teachers, and a good exercise in justification. However, in the English language learning area in schools, I can whole-heartedly say it is learning for assessment. Otherwise, we would have much better communicators of English leaving school, who would be adept at applying their language in many situations. But they are not. So where is it going wrong?

There are many different ways to enter university in Japan. Most private universities rely on their own entrance exams, but many public universities place a lot of emphasis on the national "Centre Exam" (sentaa shiken センター試験). So where do their results from school subjects fit into this process? Well, they must do pretty well in school as well if they are going to apply for any university. But the skills or the level of proficiency is not questioned, rather assumed that they have got what they need, so to speak.

The truth is that students that are on the track towards entering a big name university are actually being trained solely for the "centre exam", rather than for the application of language for life's many situations. They are being trained over and over again on the typical grammar and questions styles that appear on the exam. So, in general terms, their whole experience of learning English at high school is so that they can achieve the best result possible on their university entrance exam, and that's it. The Japanese staff English teachers are also feeling the strain of this predicament, knowing full well that their students are not being prepared for the use of English in life, rather English for an exam. Quite frankly, this is possibly the whole reason for the enormous cram school industry (juku 塾). There is a well-spread conspiracy theory that the reason the education system has not changed is because it would destroy the cram school industry that is so strongly connected to publishing companies, government bodies... well, employment and the economy in a nutshell.

I recently had the pleasure of witnessing the effect of this classroom problem. When I was supervising an "eigo" exam this term, I was stunned to see the students write down rote-learned sentences straight away after the exam time started. I don't think they even looked at the questions since they were 90-100% certain of what was going to be on it. So, I was naturally curious to know how this came to be and discovered that students basically learn the key sentences and vocabulary from the lesson, then write them over and over for study practise. Do they know what they are writing? Well, I had to find out.

The students were doing a lesson on a topic very familiar to me - digital vs printed books. I warned the students (and their teacher) that I will devote one of my conversation lessons to this topic and hope to have a good discussion on the pros and cons of both. It was astonshing to see how little they could communicate. Not even their set phrases and sentences that they were required to learn for their eigo class (I had the list in front of me). Although this is a very crude way of testing, it did question many things about the way the students are learning and why they are learning in that way.

If their English proficiency is going to improve in high school, the requirements for entering university (i.e. the centre exam) have to change. As I said earlier, there is hope. According to an article in the The Japan Times (Jun 19, 2015):

"The education ministry has unveiled an outline of new university entrance examinations featuring questions designed to gauge the applicants’ ability to think."

That sounds fantastic! It is scheduled to begin in 2020 with English, Mathematics and Japanese. It gets better too.

"To check students’ ability to think and express themselves, the new exams will have questions using long sentences, while answers will require long written answers instead of the multiple-choice questions common in the current system... The ministry also plans to introduce nationwide basic academic achievement tests in fiscal 2019 for second- and third-year high school students."

Who will be marking those papers? Wow.

It does not end there though. Schools will be required to introduce English lessons even earlier in elementary school now so that students are familiarised with the English alphabet, phonics and grammatical structures from an earlier age. There are some issues with who will actually be teaching this to the students, whether it is forced on the current elementary school teacher that has not had ESL training, or whether they employ ALTs or English-speaking Japanese nationals to fill those positions. I think that is a decision left to the principal of each school and not mandated by the government. Nevertheless, they must start introducing English classes earlier in the students' education. That sounds great too.

I applaud the education ministry for doing some research and enacting some sort of strategy to improve the situation. I encourage them to continue looking at nations like Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and Denmark to see just how they are incorporating English language learning. But it is great to see some change in Japan, albeit late and forced. Nevertheless, there has to be a more critical eye placed on the pedagogy. There has to be a better integration with technology to keep up with the pace of the rest of the world and the possible future job requirements of our students. There has to be a better understanding of the effectiveness of testing and use of this data. There has to be a clearer understanding conveyed to all key stakeholders on the purpose of learning English in schools. Is it to communicate better with people in business, in tourism, or in academia? If the answer is yes, then we need to consider what is necessary for entering university - the dreaded entrance exam or centre exam. We need to place more emphasis on speaking and listening to good quality English input. I have spent an enormous amount of time on correcting poor textbook English (usually a Japanese publisher) or suggesting a current century phrase instead of the ridiculously antiquated ones that are forced on students. This has to be carefully remedied with good authentic input.

How about we start to improve the childrens programs and offer a wide variety of world programs in English on free-to-air, instead of only exposing children to NHK's "eigo de asobo"? (I know there are a few shows like Shaun the Sheep, iCarly etc.) How about introducing the use of English globally instead of the inward focus on describing everything to do with Japan? That's feeding two birds with the one seed (the original nonviolent version), since Japanese kids desperately need more exposure to the global community. How about TV programs start reducing the amount of dubbing over languages into Japanese in interviews, documentaries and world trivia shows? Let the viewers hear the languages out there. I am starting to get off topic now.

It is very complicated, but change is needed for the betterment of our children's future use of English. If we desire better communicators on the global stage, we need change. This change has to happen from the top down. University entrance exams have to modify their requirements. This will force the high schools to carefully craft a more effective and purposeful curriculum. This will demand that junior high schools take care of the essential English grammar and prepare them for speaking and using complex reasoning processes such as debating, justifying, inductive reasoning. In order for this to occur, the elementary schools will take care of the foundations of the English language - alphabet and spelling, phonics, sentence structure and boundless enthusiasm for reading books in English (not just Disney please).

Now, wouldn't that be good?