Divs-poole

REFORM OF JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION 

with an emphasis on self-control, modesty, reassurance, and perfectionism (factors 

that when combined prioritize the written text over verbal communication and 

makes for taciturn students in the language classroom), 3) an attitude of 

ethnocentrism among native Japanese speakers, 4) a lack of both perceived and 

actual need for foreign languages,  5) and little support for maintenance of 

language skills after schooling, leading to a wide-scale attrition of language skills.  

Although these hurdles for ELT in Japan parallel factors that hamper second-

language learning in other monolingual societies such as Britain or the U.S. (see 

Holliday 1994; Thornbury 1998), there is a widespread belief in Japan, held by the 

person on the street and the education expert alike, that ELT has failed. Brian 

McVeigh sums up this belief nicely: “If English teaching at the pretertiary level is a 

disaster …, it is at the tertiary level that English education becomes peculiar, with 

inverted, simulated ideas and practices that actually sabotage English learning” 

(McVeigh 2002b, p. 157).  

The changes in university language programs, and the HE curricula in general, 

reflect recent societal pressures in Japan. In the past, there was little pressure to 

reform the curriculum. A buyer’s market, however, has forced universities to 

seriously reconsider “the product.” Not only are admissions offices scrambling to 

find new customers, but administrators and faculty are also beginning to recognize 

an equally crucial issue of retention of students, as discussed above. This has led to 

a culture in some universities of faculty development and in others of parallel 

extension programs. EUC decided to go the road of FD in an attempt to improve 

their HE “product.” 

ELT at Japanese Universities 

The numerous descriptions and explanations of the poor state of English education 

in Japan usually emphasize how “the poor English abilities of students are rooted 

in pretertiary-level training” (McVeigh 2002b, p. 157). Many of these critical 

descriptions, though accurate, do not necessarily explain the changes that have 

taken place in ELT at Japanese universities over the past 50 years (Terauchi 1996, 

2001; Wadden 1993). Though admittedly inadequate in scope and only effecting 

incremental change

1

, nevertheless, there have been legitimate attempts to reform 

tertiary-level English education in Japan. These changes to some degree parallel 

larger changes in applied linguistic and language teaching theory worldwide. As 

briefly noted above, much of the explanation of failure in English-language 

training in Japan has often been based on arguments that are culturally specific in 

nature. Certainly the sociocultural context of ELT must be paramount in any 

analysis. However, as I have argued elsewhere (Poole 2001, 2005b), the 

shortcomings of the reforms at the tertiary level may in fact reflect more upon the 

sociocultural realities of the institutional milieu of ELT at HEIs worldwide, a 

smaller culture of the ELT classroom, than on the larger culture of Japanese 

peculiarities. 

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CHAPTER 2 

As Aspinall describes (2005), most university admissions exams include a 

compulsory English proficiency subtest, although English as a foreign language 

(EFL) is not a state-required subject at primary, secondary, and tertiary schools in 

Japan. Partly because of this, university entrance exam focus on English, while 

only a handful of students are exposed to language classes in primary school, over 

10 million 12- to- 18-year-olds and another million or so university students have 

no choice but to study English. Not only is English a requirement to enter 

university, most students study the subject at some point during their four years of 

attendance. Nearly all tertiary institutions offer foreign language courses, and EFL 

is by far the most studied subject of these. In fact, although students sometimes 

have a choice of different English classes from which to choose, EFL in some form 

is a required subject at nearly every tertiary institution in Japan. In fact, the nature 

of the English language-teaching milieu at Japanese universities corresponds 

closely to Holliday’s description of a worldwide phenomenon he has defined as 

Tertiary English and Secondary English Programs, or TESEP (Holliday 1994). 

These TESEP attributes include: 1) EFL is a part of a wider curriculum and 

influenced by institutional imperatives; 2) ELT has a role alongside other subjects 

in socializing students as members of the work community; 3) EFL is but one of 

many subjects taught and must work within the parameters and resources that are 

limiting factors for all courses; 4) ELT methodology choice is limited by 

institution-wide approaches adopted across different subjects as well as by the 

expectations of the actors themselves—students, language teachers, teachers of 

other subjects, administrators, and MEXT. 

In other words, though there are certain peculiarities that exist in Japanese ELT 

at HEIs (McVeigh 2002b, pp. 157–158), many of the generalizations that describe 

the university context of language teaching and learning may be attributes not 

necessarily unique to the Japanese experience but part of a wider phenomenon of 

tertiary English programs worldwide. Kubota (1999) has argued, correctly in my 

opinion, that observers need to take more care in their evaluations of the Japanese 

context, and that there exists an overemphasis of essentialized, stereotypical 

“features” of Japanese students in the research literature on ELT. Holliday (1994) 

points out a similar danger of assuming too much when he argues that “‘learner’ 

carries the implication that the only purpose for being in the classroom is to learn 

… [while] ‘student’, on the other hand, implies roles and identities outside the 

classroom.” Likewise, anthropologists have noted that for many students at HEIs in 

Japan, classroom learning is in fact not always the main priority and warn that the 

western view of “learner” may not fit with the Japanese model (McVeigh 1997; 

Poole 2003b).  

One example of the overgeneralizations that are rather common in the ELT 

literature is the description of Asian students as “often quiet, shy and reticent in 

ESL/EFL classrooms, indicating a reserve that is the hallmark of introverts. These 

ethnic groups have a traditional cultural focus on group membership, solidarity and 

face-saving, and they de-emphasize individualism (Oxford et al. 1992, p. 445). 

While any EFL teacher who has spent time in a Japanese university language 

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