When I decided to become an English teacher abroad, there wasn't much sense of what my job would be like - or indeed what was expected of me - other than as a point of contact for the students, a representation of natural and communicative English. As the only requirement was that I be a clear and fluent English speaker, it is only natural to assume that the primary reason I was going to Japan was for this purpose - to aid students in developing their English communication skills with conversation in and out of the classroom. With this in mind, I was apprehensive but confident that I could engage the students; furthermore, my assumptions were reinforced by the program that sent me to Japan. More than anything, the program staff told us, we were there to be the native English speaker in a classroom that did not otherwise have one. Our jobs were not to teach grammar or technical points, but rather to aid students in communicating and help them develop English that they could feel comfortable using in real-life situations.
Despite being told repeatedly that I was going to Japan to help my students develop their communicative skills and real-life English - and thereby being given the implicit assumption that communicative skills were seen as something lacking but valuable, skills that should be improved because they were important and relevant - the reality that I discovered in the classroom there was quite different. Rather than engaging students in the language - forcing them to use it productively in real-life situations - the strategy in place was focused more on studying about English, as an arcane and inflexible subject. Witnessing the language-learning strategies I found in the Japanese classroom, it was no longer a mystery to me why so few people in Japan can use or understand English at all, despite six or more years of mandatory, daily study as junior high and high school students.
When I once expressed concern about this to a coworker - why European nations had children fluent in English and Japanese students could barely say "hello" - his explanation was that European countries surely employed more native speakers as classroom assistants. (Aside: his assumption is not true; European countries do not employ more native speakers in classrooms than Asian countries do.) This only confirmed my fears for my students: he, and many other Japanese that I spoke to, believed that the answer to the problem was to simply increase the number of foreign teachers in the classroom. The problem would then take care of itself. This solution doesn't even begin to address the real culprit, however - how English is taught in the Japanese classroom, and how it is viewed by both students and teachers.
If English isn't being taught for practical use, then what is the goal? The answer is simple: English is one of the subjects on standardized tests that nearly all students will take, and therefore English is taught so that students will do well on that portion of the test. Of course, some students are also taught listening, speaking and writing - practical language - but it is viewed as a nice extra. If the students have the time, resources, and motivation to become more fluent in communicative English, that's great, but the real focus is on mastering English for the test.
"Mastering," I think, is an apt description of how teachers expect students to learn test material. There is a set list of words and grammar that students must learn, and the way in which this is done is by memorization. They go through their reading textbook word-by-word and line-by-line, underlining vocabulary and key points as instructed by the teacher. They then write both a direct translation and a pronunciation note in Japanese, thereby ruining any chance they may have had of developing an authentic or even understandable accent. The students learn to mark inflections and stress when writing a word's pronunciation guide on a test, but they cannot begin to make the sounds themselves. It's not that they are not capable of it, but simply that it is considered irrelevant, a waste of time. It's not on the test.
What is on the test? Meanings (in Japanese) of vocabulary words and grammar "patterns," and direct, literal translation. There are no reading comprehension or meaning questions, only ones that ask the student to locate and reproduce something spelled out on the page. There are no questions that ask one to interpret the meaning of a sentence or passage; indeed, when I looked over the test, I got several questions wrong that asked me to identify the meaning of a phrase or paragraph. Why? The dialogue contained phrases that had an obvious implied meaning, and in fact, to a native speaker, insisting that the dialogue literally meant what was written on the page was clearly and unequivocally wrong. On the test, however, only the literal meaning was right.
Other questions contained English sentences - or asked students to create them by filling in missing words - that were simply bad English or entirely wrong. The sentences either made no sense or sounded so strange that the native speaker would be lost in the odd construction rather than recognizing the meaning. I mentioned this to my coworker who had given me a copy of the test and asked me "how fast" I could complete it and what I thought of the content. I pointed out that some questions had multiple correct answers, or sometimes no correct answer, or that the English that the question used was unarguably wrong. He faked concern, and looked at the questions that I pointed out. After reading them through, though, he quickly decided that I must be mistaken.
"They're on the test, so they've been checked," he explained. "And they look fine to me."
I conceded that he had very fluent, natural English, but that he was not a native English speaker. I ventured that they should have native speakers double-check the exam so that the students wouldn't be presented with bad or incorrect English as though it were a perfectly good example. Furthermore, I said, I wouldn't feel confident writing an exam for students in Japanese, simply because I am not a native speaker. No matter how good my language skills were, I would want to make sure that the language I used was both grammatically and culturally correct; otherwise, how dare I call it authentic and fluent Japanese? Why would the expectation be any different when obtaining content for an English test for non-native speakers?
"That's not the point," my coworker told me. "This test is only on grammar, not culture. Even if it sounds funny, the grammar pattern is right, and therefore the English is perfectly fine. We don't want to confuse students with non-literal meanings anyway."
There was no arguing with him. In his way of thinking, the test was always right because it was how we judge the students; anyone - including native speakers - who disagreed with the test must be wrong.
All year, I saw the focus on this kind of "English" - technically correct and literal, with no attention paid to context or possible ambiguity. There was no room for thought, only underlining the right word and choosing it on a multiple choice test. The lectures, the directions, the questions - everything was in Japanese, about the dead, static "English" that was on the page. It was reduced from a language to just another set of facts to remember, one among many.
I don't mean to single out Japan as the only place this kind of unproductive language learning goes on; my own high school education involved the very same approach to foreign language. We were taught by people who met a bare minimum proficiency requirement in the language, not fluent speakers, and we quietly listened on while the teachers told us "about" the target language, in English of course. We had multiple-choice vocabulary quizzes, and the longest composition we were ever required to produce was a mere 10 clauses long. The statewide exam at the culmination of four years of study contained basically the same vocabulary and grammar that we studied in our first year; each year after that had covered the basics over and over, presumably so we would not forget it before we took the test. Despite taking a foreign language for four years in high school, I can now remember only a few words - and those only because I get practice reading the street signs on my routine drives through nearby Canada.
My students in Japan had much the same attitude that I had developed toward French: it's difficult, boring, and most of all, irrelevant. Despite studying diligently and getting good grades, my classroom French never once helped me in understanding the real spoken or written French that I occasionally encountered. It was useful within our classroom only, and therefore had no relevance at all to my life. As long as the curriculum focuses on word-for-word reading of dead language rather than actual communication, I can't say I blame my students for having this attitude either. Even if they motivated themselves to apply all of their effort and brainpower in their foreign language classes, they would never end up learning real English anyway.
Note: Many of my thoughts on English education in Japan were prompted by reading several articles on the subject. Prior to seeing the problem spelled out so clearly, I was lost in little criticisms of the system and had problems seeing the big picture and the overall workings and goals of the curriculum. After reading these pieces, however, I saw that I was not the only one who noticed these problems; it was depressing to see it all described, to see how the articles talked about exactly what was wrong with my own students' education. For more information and perspective, please go ahead and read them - they are very enlightening.
Teaching English in Japan
Difficulties Japanese Have in Reading English