Right now, Japanese bureaucrats are worried. Japanese students have trouble reading and writing technical papers at the university level, and Japanese businessmen capable of pulling off deals with English-speaking corporations are a rarity.
The bureaucrats are dumbfounded. Why can’t our students pass standard world tests like TOEIC or TOEFL? Japanese students consistently score at or near the bottom of English ability in standardized tests, compared with the rest of Asia and compared with the rest of the world. They study for six years in middle school and high school. They study vocabulary and grammar. They finish every page in the textbooks. What’s wrong? Why can’t they pass these tests?
Japan’s students fare poorly on English tests because they don’t know English.
Most Japanese people can’t use English to communicate. Most Japanese struggle to write complete sentences in English, they slog through even simple books (with dictionary in tow), they can’t understand spoken language, and they can’t even ask for directions to the 7-11. I’m going to say it again: most Japanese people can’t communicate in English. Tests are not the problem; they are just a symptom, an indicator. For some reason, Japanese bureaucrats don’t seem to grasp this simple point.
The few bureaucrats who do have a grasp of the severity of this problem don’t understand why. Okay, I’ll lay it out for you. Here are the major reasons why the English program in Japanese schools completely fails.
1. Class sizes are too large
Let’s start with the simplest problem first. My own classes have 35 and 36 students in them. My friend in Akita teaches English classes with more than forty students. This is outrageous.
It is nearly impossible to teach meaningful communication to a class much larger than 20 people. Granted, if you’re just lecturing the students and there’s no interaction, then you can make the class as large as you want (see #2 below), but let’s just say for the sake of argument that you want your students to learn to communicate in English. That requires you to constantly evaluate each individual’s ability to both speak and understand spoken English. Obviously you can’t do that through written homework, so you should have each student speaking in class.
Ideally, every student in a class of 36 would be perfectly behaved and always willing to speak when called on. Unfortunately, you’re dealing with kids here. Kids lose focus, they talk to their neighbors, they are afraid to fail in front of their peers. In a class of 20, discipline is manageable. Not only does a troublemaker have fewer classmates with which to cause trouble, but the teacher can easily pick out who is causing a disruption and take the appropriate measures. In a class of 40, the possibility that there are one or more troublemakers in the class more than doubles; furthermore, that same troublemaker not only has twice as many students to talk to, but also disappears into the crowd. On top of that, students who are somewhat reluctant to participate in front of 19 of their peers have much more pressure from a larger class. Failing in front of a smaller group is much less scary than failing in front of a mob.
In addition, large class sizes encourage students to tune out during class recitations and not participate. If one student doesn’t participate in a class of 10, the teacher will notice and take action. If that same student never says a word in a class of 30, it will go unnoticed. That student then misses repetition of key vocabulary words, group reading exercises, and group responses. That makes this student more likely to fall behind in speaking ability, and thus feel even less confident later on.
The simple fix for this is to split classes in half for English lessons, but then we would need twice as many English teachers. And they’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel as it is. But even spending 25 minutes with two groups of twenty students would accomplish more than 50 minutes with forty students.
2. Lack of interactive, modern teaching methods
The prevailing teaching method among Japanese teachers is to lecture from the front of the class, using the textbook as a sort of “lesson on rails”. If you’re lucky, each class presents a discrete concept, but in many cases a teacher will just say, “Today we’re doing page 74.” In the context of a typical English class, the teacher might first stand in front and read the new words twice. All students are supposed to repeat the words after he says them, but more often than not only half the class replies in monotone. Next, he will read each line in the textbook dialogue, in the same fashion. Read and repeat. Next comes the explanation of the grammar point, in Japanese; students spend about 15 to 20 minutes copying the Japanese explanation off the board and into their notebooks. I should add that every word out of the teacher’s mouth is in Japanese except for the items read verbatim from the textbook (see below, #3).
This works okay for mathematics or history where students are expected to simply memorize facts or methods and apply them. But it completely falls apart in a language course. There are so many things wrong with this approach that I hardly know where to start. Let’s give a simple list.
It’s boring. Students receive little individual attention. There is no individual assessment of speaking or communication ability outside of standardized tests. The textbook is used as a crutch instead of a guide. Teachers try to teach the text on a page instead of the concept. Teachers waste massive amounts of time having students copy grammar points in Japanese into their notebooks, when the textbook is already a sufficient reference material. Students who want to practice speaking can’t. Students who are afraid of speaking aren’t challenged to do so. Students don’t learn to rely on English as a way to communicate ideas. There is no material outside the textbook. There is no synthesis of ideas using the language. The class is dry, like a study of a dead language– Latin comes to mind. In short, the teaching methodology is a damn travesty, a parody of a hundred year old style of teaching by grammar. Japan right now is a prime example showing that memorizing all the rules of English won’t improve one’s ability to speak it. Someone should really tell these folks to read some Noam Chomsky.
3. English teachers are unwilling or unable to speak English
My young Japanese English teacher and I were having a conversation one day about using English in the classroom, holding the lesson using as little Japanese as possible. I was trying to convince her that switching back and forth between English and Japanese was too much work, and that most students given the choice will simply think in Japanese and only use English when they absolutely have to. During our conversation, she said, “I don’t like speaking English.” Huh? You don’t like speaking English?? Then why the hell are you an English teacher?!
This isn’t an isolated problem. Many English teachers feel intimidated in the presence of a native speaker, and don’t want to speak English. They hate to make mistakes, especially in front of their students. Granted, I understand their reluctance; it’s the same reluctance that their students feel in front of their peers, and the same fear I’m sure they felt when they went to school. After all, they never really practiced speaking enough to attain a confident proficiency. Some of the older teachers can hardly speak English at all.
But the students need to learn English speaking confidence from somewhere. And they sure as hell aren’t going to learn it from their parents. Teach them it’s okay to screw up the grammar as long as they get their meaning across. Train them to expect imperfections in their spoken English, and work around it. And most of all, encourage them to speak English every single day, to think in English when they speak it. Sure, their speaking will start out strained and basic, but it certainly won’t improve if they’re too afraid of mistakes to open their mouths.
Right now you might be asking yourself, “Isn’t there a Board of Education, or a standards board, or some committee telling teachers to speak English in their classrooms? Isn’t the principal or some member of the administration jumping down these teachers’ throats, sending them to training seminars, making them do it right?”
4. No accountability to educational organizations and standards
The unfortunate answer is no. Japanese teachers don’t seem to be held accountable to any standards organization or any administration. They are only accountable to parents.
Hey, that isn’t so bad, right? Japanese parents are vigorously involved in their own child’s education. But take a closer look. If the students are presented all the material from the textbook in rote-memorization style, parents won’t complain. Parents can walk into a classroom, see a native English speaker reading some words with the right pronunciation, students furiously copying down grammar points, and they will be satisfied. After all, in their view it’s not the teacher’s fault the students aren’t learning the material in front of them. Simply put, parents aren’t aware that there’s a better way to teach the material. And so the same grammar points get taught by the same page-by-page method from the same textbook, exactly the same way that the parents were taught. Even if the students aren’t learning how to speak English, even if they can’t say a single word, parents see the students “studying” English by writing in a notebook, and assume that everything is being done as best as it can. After all, the parents never learned to speak English, right?
The flaws in this system are obvious. It presumes that parents have a perfect knowledge of every possible subject, an awareness of different teaching methods, and an understanding of every method’s benefits and drawbacks. This is unreasonable. The principal and vice-principal of each school should keep an eye on things, to make sure that every teacher is up to date on material, techniques, knowledge of their field, and teaching ability. As it stands, they already do this, and make suggestions as necessary, but their words don’t really have any weight. If that’s not working, if the school is faring poorly on tests, hire independent auditors, experts on the field. Otherwise, you wind up with a system where teachers have no incentive to teach English in English using modern methods and an interactive, engaging style.
The obvious solution from a Western perspective would be to shift accountability and responsibility to each school’s administration, and give them the power to impose sanctions on teachers who aren’t following instructions. But since Japanese teachers are expected to cycle between schools in the same area every few years, a belligerent teacher could just teach the way he wants until he gets transferred to a school where his teaching style is accepted. Therefore, such a change in accountability practices would have to either come from the very top, or all schools at once.
5. Low expectations
If you expect your students to fail, they will fail. If students think that a subject is too difficult for even their teachers, they will give up before they start. There is a prevailing notion in Japan that English is “too hard” for Japanese people. This is not just counterproductive. It’s downright ludicrous. There’s nothing about Japanese genetics or culture that make learning English impossible. I know several Japanese people who spent a few months in an English speaking country, and their communications skills approach fluency. It’s partially because they were exposed to English every day, but the motivating factor was that they lived in an environment where everyone expected them to speak English! Therefore, teachers should expect their students to speak better English than they do, from day one. These kids are brilliant. These young people have more raw brainpower than most adults. If they get jaded by repeated exposure to tedious grammar lessons, if they lose hope because their English teacher won’t even bother to speak English, (or worse, tells them the lesson is too hard!) whose fault is that?
How do we improve expectations on a larger scale? Start with the testing methods. If standardized tests focus solely on grammatical distinctions and don’t include any interactive communication component, students will be encouraged to do the bare minimum to pass these tests.
I don’t expect that these things will change anytime soon. Those in power have too much pride to take the words of a foreigner seriously. They would say that I’ve only been here a few months. In truth, a few months is plenty of time to see these problems. You don’t have to look at the test scores; just walk into a classroom and ask an average JET in the middle of nowhere. This system is screwed up.
