It has been more than 160 years since Commodore Perry came to Japan and Japan
opened its doors to the West, and the significance of English has been viewed differently
with the times. Sometimes, English was regarded as an important tool to acquire Western
knowledge, and other times, it was seen as anathema because it represented the West.
Despite this history, there have always been two trajectories of English language education
which has caused challenges; the need to cultivate practical communicative skills in English
and acquiring English skills to pass university entrance examinations. These issues still
remain today.
Many argue that university entrance examinations control the content of what is
taught in junior and senior high schools in Japan such as Japanese, maths, and history, and
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prepare students for entrance examinations” (p. 76). In terms of L2 learning motivation, this
exam-oriented nature of learning is unlikely to motivate students intrinsically. There are
other kinds of problems caused by this fact. For example, The Japanese generally have been
considered as people with low English abilities and have been criticised both domestically
and internationally (Aspinall 2006, Butler & Iino 2005). Even though the Japanese
government came up with fancy plans one after another aiming at strengthening Japanese
people’s English communication abilities, the implementation of the policies has not
necessarily been regarded as successful. For example, the following statement about the
school foreign language curriculum was announced by Ministry of Education in 1999:
In the past, we have aimed to develop a willingness to attempt active communication in a foreign language. In future, by focusing more on actual speaking and listening, we are working to develop the basic and practical ability to communicate in terms of daily conversation and simple information exchange…. In addition, children at elementary schools will also learn English conversation through the introduction of hands-on learning appropriate for elementary school students.
In addition to cultivating communicative abilities in English, the government
proposed implementation of English education in Japanese primary schools. This caused
controversy and created a big confusion among primary school teachers (Butler & Iino 2005;
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announced by MEXT in 2003. Neither of these plans helped change the situation in practice,
and English education in Japan is still centred on preparation for university entrance exams
and pressure created by it is enormous (Aspinall 2006, Frost 1991, Leonard 1998, Sturman
1989). For example, the English version of the 2003 Action Plan is available as a 7,000-
word-long paper on the MEXT homepage. Tanabe (2004) summarises the plan in the
following manner:
… The 2003 Action Plan …, maintains only two objectives in spite of its large quantity: in short, (1) to have Japanese acquire English abilities, and (2) to have them develop their ability to express themselves in their first language, Japanese. To attain these objectives, the plan also proposed to establish a system for cultivating those abilities specifically in five years. All language teachers found it quite unique that an action plan which promotes English language teaching also includes promotion of the Japanese language education…. All plans, official or unofficial, have merits and demerits. So does the 2003 Action Plan. One of the merits can be said to be its specificity in terms of financial basis and its descriptions for implementation. The plan is filled with specific numerals, specific dates, and specific places. Those concerned hardly believed such specificity, since they were used to seeing plans with few specifications. Some were amazed, and others perplexed. Some welcomed its meticulousness, and others got angry at it.
Aspinall (2006) has a different view point and suggests that the failure of the
implementation of these plans might be caused by poor levels of spoken English of Japanese
teachers of English. He (2006) also proposes that “obstacles to the improvement of foreign
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and expectations relating to teaching and learning that permeates school and university
classrooms in Japan” (p. 255), referring to Holliday’s (1999) notion of ‘small cultures’. In
Holliday’s (1999) words, “a small culture paradigm attaches ‘culture’ to small social
groupings or activities wherever there is cohesive behaviour, and thus avoids culturist ethnic,
national or international stereotyping” (p. 237) in contrast to ‘large’ culture which represents
the notions such as ‘ethnic’, ‘national’ or ‘international’. It is used “in order to show how
common characteristics of the learning environment in Japan influence the interactions of
groups of learners and teachers in ways that inhibit effective foreign language teaching
practice” (Aspinall, 2006, p. 255). Below is the summary of Aspinall’s (2006) deduction
based on Holliday’s (1999) idea of ‘small cultures’ in order to explain what is inhibiting the
teaching of language as communicative medium to adolescents and adults in Japan.
1. Japanese learners passively follow the instructions they are given by the authoritative
figures such as teachers. This explains why it is difficult to encourage students to
experiment, stretch themselves intellectually and develop their own learning strategies.
2. Showing humility is very important and it is against the social expectations to ‘show off’
your skills and to stand out. This goes both for students and younger teachers who have
to work with older colleagues with lower English-speaking abilities so that the older
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3. The belief that there is one ‘correct’ answer can also cause problems in the English
classroom, where there is a possibility for multiple appropriate answers in
communicating with others.
4. In junior and senior high schools, class size is relatively large and there are usually about
thirty-five to forty-five students with mixed-ability in a class, making it difficult to
ensure interpersonal exchanges among students using English.
(See Aspinall, 2006, p. 263-264)
What Aspinall (2006) is claiming is that the failure of communicative language education in
Japan cannot be understood only from examining government’s policies and how they have
been implemented. Aspinall (2006) claims that ‘small culture’ paradigm is useful for
exploring “the ways in which national and other norms of behaviour are reproduced, put into
effect and, on occasion, undermined in the day-to-day interactions of small groups of
teachers and learners in every part of the education system” (p. 271) because it “shows how
individuals internalize national norms and how they can use national norms to justify
patterns of behaviour” (p. 271). I have adopted this perspective in analysing the data in my
study to explain what happened in my classroom, a small community that provided
opportunities for intercultural learning to my students. This will be discussed in depth in
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As Aspinall (2006) describes that Japanese learners passively follow instructions
compared to learners in the Western countries, Takagi (2003) makes a similar observation.
She (2003) remarks that, Japanese students are often regarded as “passive and teacher-
dependent in the language classroom” (p. 130). According to Aoki (2008), this is an
influence of Confucian philosophy, in which studying means imitating words and deeds of
a good teacher. She explains therefore, challenging a teacher is considered taboo and she
contrasts this Confucian influence in Japanese education to Western education, which is
based on Socratic philosophy, in which debate is encouraged. The above-mentioned factors
are what have been making implementation of ‘communicative’ language teaching more
difficult in the present English education in Japan.
As explained above, there are several factors that have made cultivating English
communicative competence in Japan. The participants in my study share some of the
tendencies listed by Aspinall (2006) above as they went through formal education in Japan,
where these values are taught implicitly and explicitly. In other words, they had certain
expectations about ‘what an English class’ should be and ‘this is how I should behave’.
However, as I will illustrate later in Chapter 5, many students in my course found how
English was taught there very different from what they had been used to, I taught the course
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study, I thought it was important to make something that addressed some issues discussed in
this section to promote my students’ L2 visions. To be more precise, I wanted to make my
classroom “community of practice” (Lave &Wenger, 1991; Wenger 1998) for them to use
L2 for communicative purposes such as sharing their L2 learning and intercultural
experiences without worrying about finding ‘one correct answer’ to the questions they
answered about themselves. According to Wenger (2011), “Communities of practice are
groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to
do it better as they interact regularly (p. 1). I wanted them to proactively participate in
classroom activities rather than passively listen to my lectures, which they might have been
more used to.