English Educational Policy for High Schools in Japan: Ideals vs. Reality

Abstract

■ The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology issues a document known as the Course of Study Guidelines on average once every ten years. This document states the overall and specific goals for English education in Japanese junior and senior high schools including specifying the contents of ministry approved textbooks. This study looks at the influence these guidelines have had on classroom pedagogy from the point of view of the student. For this study 112 college freshmen were surveyed shortly after they had been admitted into several private universities in the Tokyo area, responding to both closed-response and open-response questions about their perceptions of classroom practice in each of the six English courses defined in the guidelines. In the closed-response questionnaire, students were asked to rate various items related to teaching. In the open-response questionnaire, students were asked to describe the teaching practice of their English teachers. Standard descriptive statistics were used to analyse the quantitative data. The study gives insights into the successes and failures of the guideline's curriculum revisions. It is a response to call for the further study by Nunan (2003) and helps to show the complicated gap between educational policies and actual teaching practice in Japan.