Teaching and Learning English between Educational and Practical Values

Teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) has increasingly come to be seen in almost entirely instrumental terms. Facing the pressure from career-oriented fields, English teaching has focused on the functional use of language and has been reduced to meeting the perceived needs of workplaces across the globe. Japan is also not exempt from this. EFL policymakers are more concerned and obsessed than their predecessors with ‘fostering practical communicative abilities to comprehend information, to understand others’ intentions and to express one's own ideas’, as is the case with the 1998–1999 revisions to the Course of Study for junior and senior high schools. Moreover, ‘Action Plan to Cultivate “Japanese with English Abilities”’, promoted by the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT) in 2003, mentions the word ‘communication’ no less than thirty-nine times and ‘speaking’ and ‘conversation’ thirty times each. Further buttressed by the revisions to the Course of Study in 2008–2009 and 2017–2018, those EFL policy directions have been deeply ingrained in Japanese English language education.

Underlying this were the strong demands from the business community for English as the international language of commerce. A notable example is a business executive who called for a shift in the focus of teaching in the English departments at Japanese universities from ‘Shakespeare’ towards ‘Tourism’, catering lucratively to mass tastes and interests (this sounds odd given that few learn Shakespeare in English departments).