Snapshot
<!--// byline_end //--><!--// article_start //--><!-- google_ad_region_start=region1 -->The Education, Science and Technology Ministry unveiled late last month a draft version of new teaching guidelines for high schools, requiring for the first time that English classes, in principle, should be taught in the language. With the revised guidelines to be implemented in 2013, the proposed policy has been causing anxiety for many English teachers.
Some schools have already been trying to teach their English classes in the language, with Yamato-Nishi High School in Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, as one such example.
When The Yomiuri Shimbun visited a recent class for second-year students, Ryoji Murakoshi, 43, placed photographs of a bat, a leech and a mosquito on the blackboard, before asking: “Which are you the most familiar with?”
However, most of his students did not respond, apparently because they had not yet learned the word “familiar.” Recognizing the puzzlement on their faces, Murakoshi repeated the question, but this time used words the students had already learned: “Which do you know the best?”
The rephrased question invited feedback from his students, leaving the teacher confident he had been able to help them grasp the new term, “familiar.”
Murakoshi spoke English during almost all of the 90-minute class, except for when he discussed grammatical issues in Japanese.
The publicly run institution was designated by the ministry as a Super English Language High School (SELHi) in 2006. Even before the designation, some of its English classes were conducted almost entirely in the language, but the pilot-school status has driven all of its English classes to follow the approach.
“I felt embarrassed when I first took classes taught entirely in English, but now I’m used to them,” a second-year student said.
For the school’s teachers, who as students took lessons that focused on grammar and direct translations into Japanese, it has been a huge challenge to shift from the more familiar approach.
However, Murakoshi said, “It’s not too hard to teach this way if we use easy vocabulary.”
On a different day, Tokyo metropolitan Kamata High School in Ota Ward was offering an English class to some freshmen who found it difficult to keep up with their regular classes.
The teacher was slowly writing on the blackboard sentences in English to review what the students were expected to have learned in middle school. “When translating English into Japanese, you should usually start at the end of the sentence,” he said.
The teacher worked slowly through the teaching materials, also introducing review, in an attempt to keep his students interested in the subject matter.
“I used to get bored in English class in middle school,” said a female student taking the class. “But now I understand it a little better.”
It seems to be quite difficult to teach English only in the language in classes like this one. Also at issue is whether most high school teachers are really capable of adopting the approach.
A ministry official says “70 percent” of them can do so because they are professionals in English education. However, Prof. Minoru Kurata of Poole Gakuin University in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, is not so sure.
The expert was once invited by a prefectural board of education to train local high school teachers. “Considering the level of English they have right now, I don’t think we can expect them to offer quality classes [when they teach them in English],” Kurata said. “Some of them should start from scratch in terms of their speaking skills. We should offer them training programs designed to help them teach English classes in the language.”
