Job Discussion Forums

[Black_Beer_Man]

Go to any European country (except for maybe Italy) and the majority of people can speak English to some degree.

Japan, despite its relative wealth to other nations, doesn't really have that many functional speakers of English. Why do you suppose that is?

- The difference in sentence structure to English.

- Lack of motivation.

- Lack of chances to speak English.

- Their regular high school courses focus too much on studying for TOEIC & TOEFL tests and not enough on speaking.

- It's an Asian thing (because Koreans and Chinese people form wealthier cities like Shanghai and Beijing aren't any better at English.)

For me, this is puzzling. The Japanese study English for many years, have loads of English study books, CDs and other courses, and are a G8 country (a major player in the world), but don't have a sound command of everyday conversational English.

What do you think needs to be done?

[Sashadroogie]

Could be it's a teacher thing...

[ZennoSaji]

The JTEs or the ALTs?

[rxk22]

They tend to like to make it over complicated.

How many times as an ALT, I saw "I am going to school" written on the board, followed by basically a page's worth of grammar explanations. If you make anything complicated enough, most people will tune out, or simply follow the least efficient way of learning, and proceed to have a low rate of learning to hours studied.

[RM1983]

Cos the JTEs cant speak two sentences without jumping back into Japanese, cos theyre scared that the kids will find out they are terrible at English (they already know).


So 4/5 lessons a week is actually 4/5 sentence patterns taught in about 90% Japanese.

[RM1983]

[spiral78]

[nightsintodreams]

I think it has more to do with Japanese people's view of the outside world.

Many never go on holiday abroad and if they do then they go on a tour or to a country where there is lots of support for Japanese people (Guam, Hawaii)

Many see foreigners as a different species. I'm around N2 level and I think my Japanese is pretty good, not great by any stretch of the imagination, but certainly functional. Yet, still 90% of Japanese people find it very difficult to just have a conversation with me without freaking out, struggling to add random English words into the conversation or continuously asking me the standard 5-10 questions for gaijin. If they can't have a conversation in Japanese with a foreigner, what chance do they have of having one in English?

[Shimokitazawa]

nightsofdreams is closest.

They de-humanize us, as they did the Chinese when they slaughtered them in the 1940s.

But, more importantly, corporate and political Japan do not want English proficient Japanese citizens. They do not want to allow English to gain any sort of foothold in Japanese society or culture.

Right wing and nationalistic politicians and powerful corporate families want to protect Japanese culture and language. Therefore, they discourage any attempts by the general Japanese population to actually learn English.

They do not want English or western culture to truly take hold here. It's a threat. And they do not allow it. Therefore, all of the eikaiwa and ALT type efforts are merely window dressing.

In short, the political and corporate elite do not allow the Japanese people to develop English proficiency.

[RM1983]

The above two posts have good points. The language and outside world are studied in order to strengthen Japanese identity in some sense. The language is compare to Japan and the culture they study always gets compared to Japan.

Look at the difference between here and Korea. ALTs are
more or less expected to know some Japanese these days whilst Koreans are gobsmacked if you can speak any Korean. In Korea they learn that foreigners DO NOT speak Korean. Whereas Japanese learn that English is in fact an English/Japanese hybrid in which the majority of vocab comes from Katakana. One lesson I saw comes with a flashcard for the useful English word "Tarento".

As a bonus to my earlier point anyway, the teachers are always making rather daft mistakes. For example, one of my JTEs wanted to get the people sitting at the back of the class to collect the worksheets along their rows and give them to her.

So, youd imagine the instruction would be something like

"People at the back, please stand up and collect the worksheets along your row" or something like that. "Bring me the worksheets"

Her instruction

"Get up from back"

Lol. That doesnt even fricking mean anything!

This is not isolated, they do not know grammar or proper vocabulary usage.

I helped one student with their writing exercise and he wrote

"I want to be a doctor because I want to make money"

A few days later I saw that the teacher had crossed out 'make' in favour of 'earn', perhaps not hearing/seeing 'make money' before.

I had to grade an activity on giving directions on which the students had learned to say "I lost my way" rather than "I'm lost".

I think we could make a good few pages of a thread based
on this topic.

Basically the teachers are crap at English, we know theyre crap, they know theyre crap and the students know theyre crap. So that's what they accept, that is their main role model.

Imagine you had a PE teacher who was obese, smoked a pack a day and hated actually playing sports, but watched it a lot. Or a music teacher
who had no musical ability, but likes listening to music sometimes and can read a mean scale.

Wouldnt work would it?

[water rat]

I once was assigned a class of five-year-olds in Jakarta. So I prepared my flashcards that I had kept from my Shane days in greater Tokyo. Colors, animals, fruit, etc - you know the drill. To my surprise, most of the kids knew this English vocab already, and the ones that didn't had absorbed it after one or two (or three classes). In Japan I had used the same cards in many cases for over a year with the the same exact students, some as old as 12 because they never could retain it!

My theory is that Japan is a pure island culture. Java is an island, but a cross-roads culture nonetheless. Bahasa Indonesia is like a real-world Esperanto. The Dutch occupied the islands for 450 years. Hence the legal terms and medical terms are all Dutch. The religious vocabulary is Arabic, the business vocabulary is English, and the cuisine vocabulary is Chinese. Then there's a Sanskrit substrate to all this... and Bahasa Indonesia was adopted as a national language following independence in 1945. If you just wander a few kilometers out of the capital they speak some dialectical variant, or even Javanese of some dialect or another, which is even more like Sanskrit.

What this has to do with the Japanese is that if a child is not exposed to a foreign language before age four, it is likely (s)he will never develop a facility for foreign language. Take the case of a white Texan boy I knew. He had spent some time as a military brat in Japan before he was three and was always saying 'chingao' without even being aware of it. Redneck that he was he could tell me things about Spanish pronunciation and vocabulary that I would never have guessed.

Japanese are never exposed to foreign language but through the filter of katakana and bad English pronunciation. Then there is the strong bias to conform and be like everyone else. As you know, even children who went to live in America for a half-year because of their father's job become gaijin. So while Java for 1,000 years has always been in the middle of trade routes, Japan 'forced' itself on the rest of the world after the West forced it to open itself up to trade. The Japanese would have been perfectly happy to have been left alone.

Also, consider my own case. I am rotten at learning new languages, and I only do it with great effort and years of work. I know that I was not exposed even a little bit to other languages, because I know that when I was eight, I knew of other 'countries' like Africa and Europe, but it never even occurred to me before age 12 maybe, that any one any where spoke some other language than the only one I knew.

[RustyShackleford]

Enthusiastic foreign teachers who care more about learning Japanese without knowing about actual teaching practice (guilty as charged) and unethusiastic local teachers who are being forced by strict curriculum guidelines to focus on Getting Through the Book and what will the students do for their clubs than actually teaching the material. Not always the case but more often than not. All this with a virtually consequence-free elementary and junior high system that is focused on getting students out the door and be damned if they actually accquire any real skills if they don't study because the tests will weed out the chafe in the end anyways.

Nationalism plays a role in it to be sure but it can't be the only factor - Vietnamese (and really, most of the Asian countries) have a healthy sense of identity that they don't like seeing spat upon by foreigners yet they don't mind becoming very highly proficient. The Disney Channel and undubbed programming plays a very big role, I'd imagine, in their case. Also, moreover, the local teachers speak the language well enough that they don't necessarily need a foreign assistant to be spicing things up.

"De-humanization" (Othering) plays a bit of a role in the Japanese context, but really, you're gonna find that happen EVERY SINGLE PLACE YOU GO IN THE BLOODY WORLD. It's not unique and Japan is nowhere near an outlier in that case. Damn annoying, but I think it's an overplayed trope. I digress...

Right now I work as what amounts to an ALT in Spain while doing some teaching study, and the difference is also night and day. Frankly, the teachers are not as fluent as the Vietnamese I met but they're much, much better equipped than the Japanese teachers.


Basically it comes down to one key factor even beyond "It's all taught in Japanese." Few teachers actively encourage their students to use the language as a living thing and the thin textbooks provided by taxpayer yen are simply not up to the task of actively reinforcing content learned throughout the course. Some good JTEs will make their own materials to go above and beyond but these not as many as one could hope.

[rtm]

I think another big reason is that most Japanese people don't see any reason to learn English. And, realistically, most won't have any real need to, the way Japanese society is set up now. Japan is a highly developed country, with decent universities and companies, and it is entirely possible for someone to have a graduate from a good university and have a highly successful career without needing to use any foreign language at all (which, I would guess, would be a lot harder in, say, Europe). There are no university exit exams that require English proficiency, like China or Korea. Few company employees ever have to communicate with a non-Japanese person. This is partly why you see so few Japanese university students studying abroad compared to neighboring countries.

Most of the reasons Japanese people learn English are entirely too vague and without much real purpose -- to be an "international person", because English is "interesting", to "talk with foreigners", etc. Vague reasons are not going to sustain any real motivation to learn. But, the system in Japan hasn't given them any other reasons to learn.

[scot47]

They do not like outsiders. Why should they learn the language ?

[rxk22]

I think the trifecta of terrible things clinches it. Terrible textbooks, a terrible way of teaching English. Coupled with JTs whose English is bad, and motivation to make a class interesting is even worse. Take all that, and there isn't any hope. Perhaps if only 1-2 aspects were bad, the others could make up for it.