How English is Taught in Japanese Schools

If you’re thinking about teaching English in Japan as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in a Japanese school, at some stage you have to think about what style of English education Japanese students receive and where you will fit into it. I’ve been teaching English in Japan for twelve years. I’ve taught in English conversation schools, state elementary and junior high schools, and also universities. In this post I will give an overview of how English is taught in Japanese schools including recent changes.

English is compulsory in Japanese schools from the third grade up until the end of high school, and then again through university. The first few years of English education are more of an introduction to foreign culture, language, and customs, although English is predominant. In fifth and sixth grades, English has recently, from 2020, become a full subject that is assessed and the results reported to parents.
For the most part, once a student reaches junior high school, English is taught in the grammar-translation method where students learn grammatical rules and then use those rules to translate English passages into Japanese. The focus of these activities is comprehension, mostly reading, with some listening. Little importance is given to meaningful communication in English between teacher and students or students with each other.

Major changes have taken place in English education over the past ten years or so. In 2011 the subject “Foreign Language Activities” (gaikokugo-katsudou) became a compulsory subject to be taught for 35 hours per year to Grades 5 and 6. The textbook that was introduced, Hi Friends, was an improvement on previous materials (Underwood and Glasgow, 2019).

MEXT, Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, in 2014 announced an English Education Reform Plan Corresponding to Globalization, in the hopes of raising the level of English skill. The “Reform Plan” introduced measures incrementally, working to a schedule of having the system completely in place by the 2020 academic year. To a foreigner teaching English in Japan, it felt like this was on the back of the winning of the 2020 Olympics which a lot of Japanese people saw as an opportunity to turn around the poor economic situation in Japan. It’s sad how it all worked out.

Starting in 2020 there was an increase in the amount of hours studying English. Foreign Language Activities became a compulsory subject in the third and fourth grades, to be taught for 35 hours per year, approximately one lesson per week. And “English as a formally assessed subject” was taught to fifth and sixth graders for 70 hours per year, approximately two lessons per week.
Alison K. Nemoto – The Language Teacher 42.4, July 2018.

Problems with English Teaching in Japan

The main criticism levelled at English teaching in Japanese junior high and high schools is the method of teaching. I mentioned the grammar-translation method above. This teaching method focusses on grammatical rules and rote memorisation and leaves little room for conversation or any form of meaningful communication.
This is due to two main factors:
The teachers are teaching towards the exams that the students will take to advance to the next academic level, whether it be for high school or university entrance. These exams very rarely have a communicative component. Approximately 89% of four-year universities use a test widely known as the Center Test (Senta Shikan), the English component of this test includes a reading and a listening section with multiple choice answers. There is nothing which asks the students to produce English.
Secondly, because the English teachers do not have a high spoken English ability themselves. The classes are mainly conducted in Japanese. These teachers certainly have the ability to teach the rules of English grammar as they are presented in the textbook, and as they are required for entrance examinations, but they do not have the ability to sustain a meaningful conversation in English, or to model pronunciation. A phrase of criticism that I’ve often heard is that in Japanese schools, students are taught about English, rather than being taught English.

These problems are exacerbated in elementary schools. There are few specialist English teachers in elementary schools. The homeroom teachers, who are expected to teach English in the absence of a specialist teacher, have not been given enough (or sometimes any) training. These homeroom teachers will often overly rely on the ALT to lead the lesson, something that is not supposed to happen. Or they will teach a lesson that consists of showing the students the materials, reading what is on the textbook pages and having the students fill in the blank spaces. If the students don’t understand what it is they’ve just completed, or its context in the English language, there is no way the teacher in this position can fix that.

Why Does English Teaching in Japan Not Improve?

Things are happening behind the scenes. MEXT is implementing policies and curricula in order to raise the standard of communication in English to meet the globalised world. Teachers are generally supportive of the new policies. So, why is improvement not happening?

Teachers also face difficulties with large class sizes, student passivity, low student motivation, low English language proficiency-their students’ and their own-poor critical thinking skills, difficult-to-use ministry-approved textbooks, and unsupportive colleagues.

Underwood and Glasgow, 2019, p. 153.

There is a gulf between the national curricular directives implemented by MEXT and what is actually happening in the classroom. A major is lack of training (Underwood and Glasgow, 2019). Although the training to be an English teacher includes a competitive examination, the training does not ensure that the teachers gain the “skills to teach the curriculum (i.e., teaching English through English, managing pair and group work, and integrating grammar teaching with communicative tasks.)” (Underwood and Glasgow, 2019).

MEXT continues to implement policy to overcome these problems. From 2023, the English component of the Center Test will stop and in its place “universities will be encouraged to accept scores from four-skill certification examinations (such as the TEAP, Eiken, TOEFL iBT, and IELTS)” (Underwood and Glasgow, 2019). It is hoped that this will increase the incentive for high schools to put more focus into the productive skills of speaking and writing (Underwood and Glasgow, 2019).

Doing well academically is very important in Japan. The students care, the teachers care, and the school cares about results (exam results). I’ve often heard from people in the English teaching industry in Japan, that Japanese students’ (and their parents) attitudes towards speaking and communicating in English are not going to change until speaking and communicating in English are assessed. Something that has not happened before in Japanese public education. If you were a busy (very busy) junior high school student encouraged by your teacher to study the material that will be in the exam, but not to neglect speaking and pronunciation practice that is also very important (but not assessed), what would you do?

I hope that these changes will start to produce an improvement in the focus of teaching in Japanese junior high schools and high schools, and that over the next few years we’ll see a noticeable improvement in student’s communicative ability.

Bibliography

MEXT. English Education Reform Plan corresponding to Globalization. Retrieved from https://www.mext.go.jp/en/news/topics/detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2014/01/23/1343591_1.pdf

Nemoto, A. K. 2018. Getting Ready for 2020: Changes and Challenges for English Education in Public Primary Schools in Japan. JALT – The Language Teacher, 42.4; July 2018. Retrieved from https://jalt-publications.org/articles/24344-getting-ready-2020-changes-and-challenges-english-education-public-primary-schools

Underwood, P. R. and Glasgow, G. P. 2019. English language policy in Japan and the Ministry of Education (MEXT). In P. Wadden and C. C. Hale (Ed.) Teaching English at Japanese Universities: A New Handbook (pp 150-156). London and New York: Routledge.