Young Japanese desire English
I am always amazed at quite how high the desire to learn English is in Japan, as despite at least 5 years in school ability levels are pretty atrocious on the whole, and even given Nova’s demise there seems to be no fall-off in the popularity of study. This recent poll conducted by goo Research in conjuction with the Yomiuri Shimbun as part of their 13th Topi-Q Net survey into the matter of English showed youth keen to learn more.
Demographics
Between the 21st and 25th of December 2007 549 young members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sex ratio was reported as 1:1 male to female, but there obviously was one odd person left over. The ages of the respondents ranged between teens to thirties, although the exact split is not reported. 40% of the sample were students in either secondary or tertiary education, 28% were full-time employees, and 12% homemakers, with the other 20% presumably made up of part-timers, NEETs, etc.
In Q1SQ, I thought it interesting that it was chance encounters with foreigners in the street or on holiday that was more of a reason to learn English when compared to other situations such as communicating better with foreign friends or dare I suggest looking for an exotic partner. I’ll also throw Q2 back at my readers.
Which aspect of Japanese do you feel is the most difficult?
Research results
Q1: Do you think it would be good to have more English ability? (Sample size=549)
Yes (to SQ) 86% No 14% Q1SQ: In what sorts of situations would you like to have more English ability? (Sample size=471, multiple answer)
When watching movies, videos, television 44% When on overseas travel 44% When using the internet 39% When studying for exams 36% When reading English newspapers, magazines, books 34% When foreigners stop me in the street 32% When it is necessary to use English at work 27% When studying overseas 7% Other 3% Q2: Which aspects of English do you feel are difficult? (Sample size=549, multiple answer)
Speaking 78% Listening 61% Writing 40% Reading 29% Q3: How satisfied were you (or are you) with your English education at middle and high school? (Sample size=549)
Satisfied 3% Satisfied to some extent 23% Dissatisfied to some extent 49% Dissatisfied 25% Q4: If you were to learn English other than through classes at school, with which method would you want to learn? (Sample size=549, multiple answer)
All Male Female Language school, English conversation class 46% 42% 51% Using commercial text books 30% 31% 28% Television or radio lessons at home 24% 21% 26% Via the internet 24% 31% 16% Overseas English study course 17% 13% 21% Home tutor 5% 4% 5% Other 3% 3% 2% Don’t plan to study outside of school 15% 14% 16%
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Saane said,
February 3, 2008 @ 02:23
I would be happy to be able to teach English to someone that need help.
Saane said,
February 3, 2008 @ 02:24
And that I have been speaking English since I was born and that makes 15 years for me.
Deas said,
February 3, 2008 @ 13:56
I currently DO teach those who need help, and I am so thankful that it’s not just me who sees the flaws and despairs about the state of English education in Japan. For a country that has such an extensive native speaker program, and whose students go through around 10 years of English education, the result about 70% of the time is a student who cannot string a simple sentence together…but still passed. It’s sad, really.
Louis said,
February 3, 2008 @ 22:14
One of the reasons I joined MIXI was to help myself learning Japanese, however what I have been doing for the most part is helping people with their English. When someone find out from my profile that I am from the states, I get messages asking to be a friend and help with their English. I don’t mind, but still shows the demand for learning English.
Chi said,
February 4, 2008 @ 02:06
Hey Louis,
Can you give me an invite for Mixi?
It seems they don’t take new members through the home page.
Thanks
Louis said,
February 4, 2008 @ 04:15
Sure. Just need an email address.
Chi said,
February 4, 2008 @ 04:40
crashacat et hotmail.com
Thanks.
Shari said,
February 4, 2008 @ 11:10
The two main impediments to the language learning problem are the fact that the instructors at lower levels are Japanese speakers who are not fluent (by a long shot) and the fact that education in Japan has a heavy emphasis on rote learning for tests rather than practical skills. Between being indoctrinated into a system which teaches them to translate constantly (rather than think in English) and being taught a vast amount of simply incorrect English in every way imaginable (grammar, pronunciation, vocab.) by teachers who don’t know how to speak properly, students are set up for the rest of their lives with problems that are really hard to shake.
The worst part is the students don’t even know the problems. They think they study in the best ways (memorize, memorize, memorize) and are speaking correctly. I can’t tell you how many times students have said, “I have ever been to America” and thought that was a proper use of “ever” because some Japanese native teacher of English taught them that “ever” and “never” were simple opposites of one another. What is more, most people aren’t willing to do what it takes past a certain level to improve so they go to school for years and improve little. Their devotion to improving is often only as deep as spending the money. They think spending time in the presence of a foreigner one hour a week is enough to see improvement (regardless of how passive they are in the lesson) and don’t study on their own at all.
Helping people with their English is often a bottomless pit. I hope those who do it aren’t doing it for free.
Tkyosam said,
February 4, 2008 @ 14:05
I never appreciated how hard English was to learn as a 2nd langauge til I started living here.
My question is, has Japanese langauge drastically changed over time as much as English has?
Simon Thorpe said,
February 4, 2008 @ 14:44
Interesting that there is a very high ratio of respondents who are dissatisfied/dissatisfied to some extent in this survey. Hello Monbusho? You taking note? The state of English education and the struggle Japanese students seem to have with the language is something I’ve followed in the news for many years.
Then again, I’m hardly surprised when I look at the English programmes run by just about every private and public language school in Japan. They lack focus, purpose, but most of all direction. Their content and structure lacks even the most rudimentary basics of essential language teaching. t is also hardly surprising when, recently, I learned Japan ranks 21 out of 25 Asian countries for International English language test scores (China & S. Korea rank top).
The whole culture of English teaching in Japan needs to change. Japanese colleges and universities need to hire more professionally qualified and experienced language instructors and demonstrate their commitment to offering a stable work environment. Hiring the usual (generally not-so-qualified) ‘tourist teachers’ who are happy to travel the ESL circuit for many years without any desire to commit themselves to the job reflects badly on the school.
If I may also be so bold (and honest) to say that, Japanese language institutions also seem to prefer American/Canadian/Australian teachers. They discriminate against English English teachers. Why? I tried for many years to get a teaching job in Japan. Professionally, I’m qualified and experienced and I also speak Japanese almost fluently. Didn’t get a single reply to more than 50 applications. I gave up on Japan, like most who believe its a lost cause.
Where am I now? Contributing my knowledge and skills to help keeping China at No.1 for not only language skills, but computer skills, and occasionally current affairs too. A foreigner doing this at any language department in any Japanese college or university would never be possible. China is rapidly becoming a more attractive option for professional and qualified language instructors who are serious about their careers and who, in turn, form more of a long-term emotional attachment to the colleges/universities we work for. China is the place to be now.
Japan needs to change the whole culture of English teaching or lag linguistically behind other Asian countries. Its time again for Japan to start learning from China.
Dismal ALT said,
February 4, 2008 @ 16:19
I couldn’t agree more about the lack of focus and pragmatism. I currently work from an ALT dispatcher (one of the few with a good reputation) in an Elementary school and Kindergarten. The company has a colorful program full of cute flash cards, story boards, and songs. But the coherence of the lessons are little to none. Every lesson (by their default plan) is episodic and not structured to continually build a conversation. After the teachers and I became tired of the incoherence, we started making our own plans that were more pragmatic. But I feel the approach to English education in Japan is mostly eposidic edutainment acts and not focused development.
Youth expectations for 2008 » 世論 What Japan Thinks said,
February 4, 2008 @ 22:29
[…] the second part of the survey published on Saturday into English study, this is a recent poll conducted by goo Research in conjuction with the Yomiuri Shimbun as part of […]
Charles Jannuzi said,
February 5, 2008 @ 16:06
When asked, a lot of people all over the world would say they want to learn a foreign language. Perhaps especially true in what are for the most part mono-lingual countries, and even more especially mono-lingual countries where the main language isn’t English. That doesn’t mean, though, that most people have a clue as to how to go about it in any specific, effective way. People want a lot of things, that doesn’t mean they spend a lot of time going after them–they want world peace, they want a clean environment, they want ….
southofreality said,
February 9, 2008 @ 02:28
I like studying Japanese, and had studied it back in the States before I came to Japan. When I think of how much some Japanese people spend on English lessons, I wonder if I would have been willing to spend even half as much to practice Japanese with a native Japanese speaker back home if I had had the opportunity to do so.
Whitecap said,
February 15, 2008 @ 12:21
From my perspective - an Australian born resident of Japan for almost 19 years, married to a Japanese, with children in the public education system, one possible, if partial, explanation for the popularity of expensive English conversation lessons despite the very modest progress most people seem to make, is the opportunity to interact under supportive and controlled conditions of the English-for-leisure classroom.
My impression is that many Japanese people are often made genuinely anxious by the prospect of interacting with non-Japanese for deep-seated cultural reasons. In a culture that prizes values such as “omoiyari” and “enryo” that require sensitivity to the unspoken feelings of other cultural insiders - a kind of mind-reading trick that is only possible given a high degree of conformity in socialization practices and interaction norms, dealing with relatively unreadable and unpredictable outsiders under real life conditions can be more of a leap than many people feel comfortable with, however much they hanker after the cache that an ability to casually interact on the street with foreigners might bring … Hence the perennial attraction of the less risky classroom environment perhaps.
Another point not made often enough in these discussions it seems to me is the extent to which the mass media consistently reinforce the idea that some degree of competent bilingualism for Japanese verges on the unnatural. And lastly, I don’t think that old chestnut about an English “kompurekkusu” should ever be underestimated - the widespread aversion to the feelings of vulnerability - the risk of being the inferior in terms of power relations as a foreign language speaker in an interaction with a native speaker. The uchi/soto type distinction between cultural insiders and outsiders is very powerful and raises what you might call the “affective guard” very high. A commercial airing on Japanese TV at the moment captures all of this very succintly: it shows a young “sarariman” daydreaming of himself as the recipient of a victory parade for managing a brief response to a question in English from a non-Japanese business counterpart.
Whitecap said,
February 15, 2008 @ 14:02
Oops, typo correction to the above, which should read “however much they hanker after the CACHET that an ability to casually interact on the street with foreigners might bring …”
Tomoko said,
February 15, 2008 @ 15:16
Ever since I came back from the US where I studied English as an exchange student almost two decades ago, I’ve been angry with the Japanese way of education. I was the top student at that time, but I realized my English was hopeless especially in pronunciation, listening comprehension, and wording. The English I had learned at school was far from practical.
I’ve been tutoring now and know what kind of skills are necessary to pass the entrance exams for universities. I wonder, however, what it is that Japanese schools (public schools, I mean) are aiming at. If it’s an ability to conduct a daily conversation (as the textbooks are full of dialogs), then more opportunities to practice it with a native speaker or a bilingual’s instruction will be essential. If reading skills are to be developed, which a large number of students find most difficult, then more focus on grammar is a must. Unfortunately, not many public schools seem to be doing either of these approaches. As I was a student, school didn’t teach me how to speak, but they taught me how to read and write. (There was a grammar class at that time, which no longer exists.) Students today, however, can neither carry on a conversation nor read long paragraphs, not because they are unintelligent but because the means school is taking is just halfway. Who wants to put time and effort into things that don’t fulfill any purpose after all? With the way schools are today, I don’t think students can be motivated to learn English. I regret to see no improvement in the past two decades.
Whitecap said,
February 15, 2008 @ 20:26
Apart from the cultural-specific issues which seem to affect many Japanese learners mentioned in my previous post, I also thoroughly agree with Tomoko, Dismal ALT and Simon Thorpe that greater policy coherence with regard to English language education in public schooling is a key to a more satisfactory outcome for more students. The introduction of English to elementary schools in recent years is yet another area where incoherent policy reflects conflicting views about the appropriateness of English at the elementary level, and how best to deliver it. At my children’s elementary school, for example, English edutainment consits of sporadic lessons - once a month at most, and seems to largely consist of randomly chosen content taught by poorly paid, sometimes totally inexperienced and obviously unqualified teachers fresh off the plane by the local ALT dispatch company. A waste of everyone’s time mostly and the only lasting effect seems to be the entrenching of the increasingly low status and exploitive conditions of a large segment of the tourist-teacher labour market, held at comfortable arms length from the “real” Japanese educational professionals by the dispatch companies.
Like others I think a good place to start would be a thorough-going rethink of English language policy objectives and curricula at all levels of public education, much greater access to high quality in-house training for Japanese teachers of English, including opportunities for extended overseas study, and shifting the emphasis in native EFL teacher recruitment to attracting well-qualified / experienced native EFL teachers (with Japanese language skills or the commitment to achieve them) to fairly-recompensed, secure, long-term positions. The upshot would be lots more better-qualified JTE’s and fewer but better-qualified native EFL teachers, strategically located in positions where they have the scope to make a positive difference.
Charles Jannuzi said,
February 16, 2008 @ 10:57
I think Tomoko diagnoses the situation very accurately. One thing that reinforces that point about reading is this: I know that the surefire way to bring up my students’ scores on the TOEIC is to work on reading skills and reading skills for taking the TOEIC. If only to get them to move more quickly and fill in all the answers with at least their best possible guess. Some students when taking the TOEIC for the first time seem shocked the extent and difficulty level of the reading problems. They thought ‘communication’ and ‘international communication’ meant speaking and listening only.
To put it into a somewhat international perspective though, I have to point out the following:
1. China and S.Korea don’t compare to Japan on TOEIC and TOEFL (yet anyway) because in Japan we have extensive numbers taking the test without really preparing. It isn’t expensive for most Japanese, and so some just take it to see what it is like and get a better idea of how to study for it. I always advise students that doing this with the TOEIC is all right, but not to clutter their record up with frivolous TOEFL scores if they plan to study overseas. In other words use the TOEIC to prepare for the TOEFL.
2. Japan sends twice as many students overseas than the US does, and most often Japanese students go abroad to study English (they don’t need the US for engineering programs, for example). So the US is a dismal failure compared to Japan on internationalization and foreign language study. Period.
Tomoko said,
February 17, 2008 @ 22:44
I’ve read all the comments here and felt like crying with frustration. Neither students nor teachers have been satisfied with the English education in Japan, and why can’t we change anything at all? How long do we have to continue a discussion like this before Monkasho or the board of education may finally listen to us? I doubt, however, if anyone out there knows what English is because their approaches always seem too amateur to me.
It’s teachers who can make a change, isn’t it? Only those who have several years of teaching experience should know what is really required, and I wonder how they can cooperate to do something for the sake of all of us. Can anyone please give me concrete ideas, and I’ll do whatever I can do. If everyone just waits for someone else to take action, nothing will change for ever.
Charles Jannuzi said,
February 18, 2008 @ 22:58
Teachers have to fit into organizations and career structures. Anyone can put it all on the line to take on the powers that be, but you can’t make a career of it. So you have the situation where individual teachers, no matter what they think or feel, really can’t do much.
Also, much of the domination of the profession of ‘English Language Teaching’ comes from outside Japan. The Japanese teachers settle on ‘reading-translation’ classes to survive. The complementary strategy for foreign nationals is to have students huge amounts of ‘pair practice’. Yaku-doku and pair practice are not going to change the situation.
I plan to publish an analysis piece on my blog as to ‘why English is (or is not) a failure in Japan’s education system’.
CJ
Charles Jannuzi said,
February 18, 2008 @ 22:58
Teachers have to fit into organizations and career structures. Anyone can put it all on the line to take on the powers that be, but you can’t make a career of it. So you have the situation where individual teachers, no matter what they think or feel, really can’t do much.
Also, much of the domination of the profession of ‘English Language Teaching’ comes from outside Japan. The Japanese teachers settle on ‘reading-translation’ classes to survive. The complementary strategy for foreign nationals is to have students do huge amounts of ‘pair practice’. Yaku-doku and pair practice are not going to change the situation.
I plan to publish an analysis piece on my blog as to ‘why English is (or is not) a failure in Japan’s education system’.
CJ
Greg said,
April 10, 2008 @ 05:46
I would be really honored to teach conversational english to school children. I could even do it over the internet. Any takers?
First lesson free. Email me.