Trial of English-speaking test for Tokyo high schools raises eyebrows

4 comments

1. It would be extremely easy to prepare students to pass a test like this with once weekly communication based immersion lessons. If the English teachers at your local school cannot do this without a big fuss, then they aren’t worth the money they are paid and should be sacked. This is not rocket science (which students actually do learn in school) it’s just very basic competency in speaking a language they spent literal years studying. Japan needs to stop failing young people and take responsibility for an education system that is utterly dysfunctional unless you already have every natural advantage and come from a privileged background.

2. Those final two paragraphs are right on the money. The way English is taught is abysmal and needs to be addressed well before this test is ever issued. This test will do nothing but harm most the kids.

3. Until Japan realizes that katakana English is useless they will not get the majority of their young people speaking English correctly. How does one hour of English lesson once a week compete with the bombardment of katakana English in their daily lives through media?

4. There are so many reasons why English is such a mess here and if anyone’s interested I can elaborate, but regarding English in education:

   Kimie Oshima conducted a sociolinguistic study in 2002, hypothesizing that increased contact with English in the last half century had increased the amount of gairaigo in Japanese, which was especially visible in the media. Gairaigo would also have an impact on English education because gairaigo would be considered English rather than Japanese. On the other hand, there is the assumption that, as a result of the Katakana transcription and pronunciation, gairaigo is no longer considered English at all, but rather as Japanese terms with no connection to English. The confusion goes both ways.

   She wondered if treating gairaigo in the context of English classes would benefit English language learners by allowing them to acquire a larger English vocabulary. And I agree but would add that they should be taught in kokugo class as well, because loan words are a fucking part of the language.

   Students would assign the wrong meaning to English words if they did not address “false friends” in class. For example, Japanese students misinterpret the word “dump” as “heavy” or “big,” which stems from the fact that there is the gairaigo danpukā / ダンプカー that refers to a truck. Another example is the word “service,” (sābisu / サービス) which grew in meaning and includes “free gift” in addition to its original English meaning.  grew in meaning to include “free gift” in addition to “service.”

   Besides confusion about the meaning of gairaigo, possibly the biggest impact gairaigo has on English learning is pronunciation. Recognizing different words that become homophones in the Japanese phonetic system, such as the words “very” and “berry” – both “berī / ベリー” in Japanese – emerges as a major difficulty for Japanese English learners.
   Explaining such phenomena in class could show a positive impact on English learning and also promote students’ interest, as they can connect newly learned things with something they already know from their mother tongue. In early English education, cognates such as sandoicchi / サンドイッチ (eng. sandwich) and tēburu / テーブル (eng. table) can thus be used to build on existing English vocabulary from gairaigo vocabulary and increase motivation for English learning.

   With the inclusion of gairaigo in English textbooks and a conscious teaching of the semantic differences of especially “false friends”, the English already contained in Japanese could be instrumentalized for English learning. Japanese English teachers would be preferred for this purpose, since they have the necessary background knowledge to be able to explain the subtle differences of “false friends”.
   Major problem here is, that there are Japanese English teachers out there that know fuck all about English.

   According to TOEFL results, Japanese conversational English proficiency is among the lowest in the world. The 2020 EF English Proficiency Index (EPI), which assesses the English proficiency of over 2.2 million participants from 100 countries worldwide, ranks Japan 55th due to poor teaching practices that prioritize written translations and entrance exam grading over practical use of English.

   What needs to happen are fluent, bilingual English teachers that teach pronunciation and etymology properly before implementing more tests students are overwhelmed with.