Have a Great Year of the Cat

Facially Salient Visual Articulatory Gesture

We are exploring different ways to publish articles here at the ELT J blog. Forgive the repetition of content.

Facially Salient Articulatory Gesture

ELT in Japan: What is coming in 2010

These feature articles and articles in brief are under development for publication in 2010 at the ELT-J Online Magazine:

1. Vocabulary activities (semantic mapping) for the conversation class.
2. Vocabulary activities (semantic mapping) for the beginning-level writing class.
3. Teaching English /l/ vs. /r/ (applied phonology).
4. Introducing a different sort of audio-visual electronic pronunciation dictionary for FL learning (follows up on the previous article about units of phonology, the 'visually salient articulatory gesture').
5. Variations of and considerations for the multiple-choice vocabulary question for FL practice and assessment.
6. A look at schema theory and its applications for ELT.
7. A look at 'phonemic awareness' and 'phonological awareness'--what are they and how might they apply to ELT.
8. Analysis of the issue 'phonics vs. whole language' from an ELT perspective.
9. An adaptation of 'semantic feature analysis' to the classroom study of EFL vocabulary.

Labels: applied phonology, ELT in Japan, English /l/ vs. /r/, phonemic awareness, phonics, schema theory, semantic map, visual pronunciation dictionary, vocabulary development

Try free open-source run-anywhere software

Try free open-source run-anywhere software

Why use expensive commercial 'bloatware' (which locks you into an endless cycle of planned obsolescence at your expense) when so much free, open-source software is now available? Much of it even runs on Windows, although much of the software emerged from open source communities and companies that backed open source (at least in some forms).

The portable applications, such as Lupo PenSuite and PortableApps will run on the hard drive of your computer (without creating hard-to-uninstall files and registry artifacts), but you can also run them from a portable pen drive or other such memory device (SD card, Memory Stick, attached external hard drive, etc.). There are other products and online services available in addition to the ones listed here, but, except for the last entry on the list ('Other'), I am only including ones that I have downloaded and am using now.

It is not just that expensive proprietary software is being challenged by cheaper and even free rivals. It's that desktop computing and office functions, like DTP and word processing, are now being ingeniously adapted to ubiquitous computing and the new Web (Web 2.0). What I like about much of the software listed below is that, not only is it free, but I can run it on all my computers and on any computer that I use (such as at an internet cafe when I travel), with or without an internet connection (except Google Docs and PicasaWeb , which are a web-based word processor and photo album, respectively).


I. Lupo PenSuite
http://www.lupopensuite.com/

This is a whole set of portable programs (you can run them from your chosen type of plug-in memory, such as an SD card, Memory Stick, or Pen Drive), and it is available in both full and light versions.

Download here:

http://www.lupopensuite.com/download.htm

The suite includes portable versions of Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, Gimp, IrFanView, ClamWin Anti-Virus, AbiWord WP, and numerous other productivity applications and utilities. Language packs for many languages are also available.

Here is a link to a longer list of software either included with the Lupo PenSuite or compatible with it, and available for download:

http://www.lupopensuite.com/a-internet.htm



II. PortableApps
http://portableapps.com/

Another total package of programs that comes in a suite or to be run 'anywhere' as individual programs. This one includes a very nifty portable, run-anywhere version of Open Office, itself a suite of programs that can replace MS Office.

Download versions of the PortApps suite here:

http://portableapps.com/download

III. OpenOffice from Sun
http://www.openoffice.org/

This is a complete office suite that includes compatibility with MS Office and other word processors. However, the open document standard that is being promoted with Open Office also integrates with Google Documents, the online word processor that Google provides to its account holders.

Download information is here:

http://download.openoffice.org/index.html

Free and discounted software from Sun (the providers of OpenOffice) for educators and educational institutions.

http://www.sun.com/solutions/landing/industry/education/edusoftware.xml

http://www.sun.com/solutions/landing/industry/education/edusoftware.xml#StarOffice


IV. Yahoo! Downloads
http://downloads.yahoo.com/

Mostly downloads for web communications and Web 2.0 life.

Try http://mobile.yahoo.com/ if you can do real 3G telephony with a programmable phone.
If you are accessing them from your phone, type m.yahoo.com in your phone browser.

V. Google Docs
http://docs.google.com/


You need a Google account, and once you have it, you can co-ordinate your g-mail activity with your Google Docs (such as upload an attached .doc from an e-mail and begin to edit it at the Google Docs interface, which is really a word processor running in your browser). Not only does Google Docs integrate with other Google services, but it accepts the Open Document format (such as documents saved in the default format of Open Office, extension .odt) and Star Office (.sxw) as well as MS (.doc) and Rich Text (.rtf).

Also, make note of PicasaWeb, which integrates a web service for photos with the really good photo editing and album software available through Google Pack, a program called Picasa.

http://picasaweb.google.com/

Google also makes available a much more extensive collection of useful and fun software (GooglePack) at:

http://pack.google.com


VI. Other

A. Free Portable Software Downloads
http://www.portablefreeware.com/


B. Open Source Living
http://osliving.com/index.php


For example, imagine replacing Adobe Page Maker for DTP with freeware, such as Scribus:

http://osliving.com/documents/word-office-suites/scribus/

C. winPenPack 3.4
http://www.winpenpack.com/main/news.php


Another suite of programs optimized to run anywhere, such as on a pen drive, SD card, Memory Stick or external drive..

http://sourceforge.net/projects/winpenpack/


http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=827925

To download, go here:

http://www.winpenpack.com/main/download.php?list.201

or

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=214327

Labels: free software, freeware, Ichitaro, Just System, Open Office, open source, pendrive, portable software, Star Office, Sun Microsystems, ubiquitous computing

ELT in Japan's MyBlogLog address (Yahoo Service)

For those of you who read and blogon the Yahoo side of things, there is this:

http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/eltinjapan/

'ELT in Japan', Issue 1, Article: "Why is 'research' in ELT/TEFL/TESOL/AL/SLA so irrelevant?"

Why is 'research' in ELT/TEFL/TESOL/AL/SLA so irrelevant?
by Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan


While most of the research in support of and about ELT is produced in academia, most actual language teaching and language learning are done outside academia. Even when FLs get taught at universities, the people who often end up with the teaching duties are not in the sort of university posts that are meant for research.

However, I believe the single biggest issue is the institutional approach to science and knowledge which falls under the overwhelming intellectual influences of the past half century. In short, research that is supposed to be in support of ELT is largely irrelevant, invalid and not applicable to teaching and learning because of two academic traditions: structuralism and behaviourism.

Structuralism comprises the linguistic framework for much of ELT, and yet structuralism is an historic relic of linguistics. The linguistic 'units' and 'models' and 'key concepts' of ELT are largely based on structuralist ones (and rather simplistic notions of the structuralist concepts at that). This tends to have a stultifying effect on research because it is considered bad form to question or otherwise problematize the inadequacies of ELT's simplistic versions of structuralist concepts.

The other stultifying inheritance is behaviourism (and little surprise then that most structuralists operated under behaviourist assumptions). Most research in academic SLA (an emergent field from AL that has mostly nothing to do with linguistics now, ironically enough), for example, is based on basically behaviourist preconcpetions about how to elicit 'language learning behaviour' (e.g., mastery of a 'form') from a study's subjects. The interpretation of the results (such as they are) become even more muddled because the researchers typically are not clear about whether they are looking for a psychological/psycho-linguistic OR a sociological insight about the particular population they are using as subjects (often without specifying just what population it was that they were supposed to have sampled in doing their research).

Other deficiencies abound and glare out at the teacher attempting to use SLA research to inform teaching: Very small subject groups, lack of clarity over linguistic concepts that are supposed to underly the research, inappropriate use of statistics, un-normed populations, etc. And yet an often-read, automatic defense of such research is that it, unlike qualitative research, is GENERALIZABLE. Which is simply to beg the question, because such apologists never specify to which population they want to generalize the findings. I would add, however, that I know of absolutely no finding from SLA research that is generalizable to my students, let alone one that generalizes to all of the human race now learning a FL. Moreover, it all gets even more muddled if you go back to the objection over psychological/pscyho-linguistic/cognitive goals vs. sociological ones (in which case, for example, complex differences across cultures, age groups, gender, social class and economic background, etc. become very important).

Most 'research' is done by individuals, groups and networks of people in academic posts. About the only time classroom teachers engage in such activity is when they go back to do a master's or doctoral degree under such academics.

Finally, perhaps the issue can be expanded to the following concerns:

(1) Within a socially delimited field such as 'ELT', what constitutes knowledge and who has the right to claim it as such?

(2) Are experimental and statistical procedures (mostly derived from the field of education's understanding of positivism, empiricism and probability) written up in academic journal studies the most appropriate for developing ELT/FLT and LL in most institutional settings worldwide?

(3) Much of SLA research (like the larger field of 'educational research' from which its methods came) seems to be trying to deal scientifically and experimentally with what are pscyhological, psycholinguistic and phenomenological data, and yet this line of academic research has latched onto statistical analysis of group behaviour. In short, what they are doing is trying to sociologize the psychology and phenomenology of second/foreign language acqusition, but their assumptions and conclusions are for the most part behaviouristic. Moreover, they are quite likely attempting to objectify and quantify phenomena for which parametric and non-parametric statistics were not designed.


However, the ideological apparatus/profession that is 'global ELT' is not really set up to address more than a mere handful of actual linguistic or psycholinguistic issues, and even those are treated quite arbitrarily and superficially. Add in the disconnect between the academic discourse, graduate training, materials publishing, language policy in programs and institutions (where decisions are usually made by people who know next to nothing about LT or LL), and actual classroom teaching and you get something like the world as we know it.

'ELT in Japan', Issue 1, Article: Breaking down the 'theory vs. practice' distinction

Breaking down the 'theory vs. practice' distinction
by Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan


What separates 'academic theory' from 'effective practice' in language teaching is this: the academic tries to make things explicit in the form of 'airtight' arguments conforming to the requirements and readership expectations of the genres accepted for publication (e.g., the research report). .

This means however that the academic presents 'theory' in rather formulaic discourse away from the classroom. Often it is more like theory about theory--meta-theory. Academic discourse is often sold as 'objective science or 'substantiated knowledge', but often it only presents the outward appearance of objectivity (indeed, most science is actually dogmatic arguments supported by selective evidence).

Academic prose, even in the form of the 'research report' often presents overgeneralized theories which are uncritically accepted as 'objective' only because the formal trappings of academic genres have been met faithfully. Little or no research results from current second language acquisition research, for example, actually generalizes to real language teaching and learning worldwide. However, the theories or meta-theories put into service of turning such evidence and results into truth assertions are built on the assumption that they are generalizable. Hence generalizability is actually a begged question at most academic publications about 'ELT' and 'SLA'. .

On the other hand, teachers' 'theories of practice' arise while performing in classrooms where students are effectively learning. Effective teachers must build up their body of guiding theory from their past experiences both teaching and learning a language--as well as from their formal professional training and career development activities. It also takes patience, creativity and commitment. It is a set of bootstrap learning processes whereby the more one knows the more one is able to learn and improve. Teachers' theories (although often never made explicit in the form of 'airtight arguments' in academic genres) often apply in real schools and classrooms in ways far too inter-related and complex to be decontextualized and presented in academic discourse. It is a shame of academic discourse that often the concepts, processes and actions that are the most difficult to describe and explain are the very ones ignored by academics (because of their need to put things into airtight arguments that satisfy fellow academics, such as editors and article reviewers).

Teachers should still present their knowledge in formal outlets like articles and conference presentations, but, when they do so, we must realize we get only 'snapshots' and partial static insights from what it is they actually do when they teach in real learning situations. Perhaps the best people to make sense of this incomplete information and integrate it into existing mental schema for language teaching and learning, though, are practicing teachers.

I'm not arguing those who theorize and write can't or don't teach. What I am saying, though, is that once we engage in the 'academic discourse' language game, we have to realize the limitations--and hopefully push the conventions (especially if we become editors). And a note of warning: playing the research and discourse games of the academic can actually seriously detract from our teaching!

Labels: practice, theories in practice, theories of practice, theory

ELT in Japan, Issue 1, Feature Article: "The Facially Salient Articulatory Gesture as a Basic Unit for Applied Phonology in ELT"

ELT in Japan, Issue 1, Feature Article:

The Facially Salient Articulatory Gesture as a Basic Unit for Applied Phonology in ELT
by Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan

Introduction

This paper summarizes the analysis and interpretation of the results of two electromyographic procedures  in experimental phonology. The results of electromyographic experiments have been interpreted and  analyzed using concepts and theory from linguistics, applied linguistics, and phonology, specifically articulatory  phonology. The first electromyographic procedure on one native speaker of English obtained data on  the consonant sounds of English. The second electromyographic procedure was used to explore the large  vowel system of English.

Based on the results of these experiments, we propose a new theory about the basic sub-lexical unit of  speech production and perception. This paper posits a new, discrete, invariant, psychological unit of  phonology that functions below the level of word meaning to organize language. This model is a variation  of the articulatory gesture of articulatory phonology and phonetics, and it has implications and applications  relevant in many areas of applied linguistics and language education, including native language arts, second  and foreign language learning, and literacy. In order to contrast the new concept with the previously  established concepts of the 'phoneme' and 'feature', we will call the new phonological prime the 'visual  articulatory gesture', or, alternatively, it can be referred to as the 'facially salient articulatory gesture'.  The advantage of this new basic sub-lexical unit in phonology--and as a model for applied phonology in support of TEFL--is not merely the need in linguistics, applied linguistics and educational linguistics for an abstract  model that makes better phonetic and psychological sense. Rather, we feel strongly that any model more true of linguistic and psychological reality will yield better concepts, principles and practices for the classroom and materials.

The theory that emerges from our research helps to solve the problem of the lack of phonetic realism that  plagues structuralist, behaviorist and formalist accounts of the phonology of a language in actual acquisition  and then communicative use (production and perception). In part, this model of phonology is based on  a view of language as a learning system that builds up to a learned, stable state of functional complexity  (that is, the flow from language acquisition and learning to fluent use of a language to learn and communicate).

The 'learning to learn' stage involves necessary and sufficient inputs and feedback from visual,  acoustic-phonetic and kinesthetic signals. We call the most basic, sub-lexical, phonological unit of this  model (and indeed all language use) the 'articulatory gesture'. However, unlike previously established conceptualizations of the term 'articulatory gesture', which never really address what is meant by the term 'gesture', our basic sub-lexical unit involves 'faciality' or 'facial salience' in the visual and physiological components.

In this way we clarify why articulatory gestures are gestural in a linguistic sense and can help  account for rapid, reduced, connected, co-articulated speech. Unlike the descriptively simplistic but non- explanatory abstractions of the phoneme or feature, articulatory gestures ARE NOT merely formalizations  of repetitious, sequenced movements of articulators tracked at prominent points of articulation. Rather, the  articulatory gesture as a unit of phonology helps models psychological control of both language production  and perception. For a schematic overview of the articulatory gesture with the previously established analogues.


Click on each graphic or page number to load the page.

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Alternatively, you can read an html version of the article (with hyperlinks to graphics, Figures 1-3) at the following location: 

http://japanheo.blogspot.com/2009/12/facially-salient-articulatory-gesture.html




Also, this entire article is available as viewable graphics at the following photoalbum on line:

Facially Salient Articulatory Gesture

labels: phoneme, feature, structuralism, articulatory gesture, visually salient articulatory gesture, basic unit of phonology, sub-lexical analysis of language, language acquisition 

ELT in Japan, Issue 1, Feature Article: "Teaching as a Foreign National at Japanese Universities"

Teaching as a Foreign National at Japanese Universities: Shifting Terms of Institutional Status, Employment, Work Conditions and Related Concerns

by Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan

Introduction

The Japanese tertiary system consists of some 1250 national, public, and private four- and two-year institutions. At these degree-awarding universities and colleges, the terms 'foreign lecturer' or 'foreign instructor' refer to any non-Japanese personnel teaching below the status of professor. Most typically though the terms refer to full-time foreign language teachers who are 'native speakers' of the language they teach.

The vast majority of these foreign nationals teach English as a foreign language (EFL), but the number teaching other important languages, especially Asian ones, such as Mandarin Chinese, has also risen significantly during the past two decades. The non-Japanese teaching EFL in Japan are often assigned general English classes as part or all of their teaching duties. General English refers to service course English required as part of general education requirements of tertiary education.

Even when foreign nationals teach classes for a major or specialty or as a general education elective, their assigned courses tend to focus on 'English communication', which is often equated with oral English, such as listening and speaking/conversation. However, it is also quite common to find them teaching writing/composition, an expressive skill that requires literacy in the foreign language.

Foreign lecturer status at the national universities

The term 'foreign lecturer' ('gaikokujin kyoushi') in particular had also been the official name for a position within a program that was established by the ministry of education which, in effect, placed foreign nationals into Japan's national universities for the purposes of foreign language teaching and internationalization. While not integrated into the career structure or the collegial organization of the former national university system, the roles of the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' as language teacher, 'cultural informant', and permanent outsider are strikingly parallel to the JET Programme and the Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) it places in the secondary school system nationwide.

However, while the JET Programme continues to expand and entrench in lower and upper secondary education, the old foreign lecturer system of the national universities has been phased out. This system has roots going back to the Meiji Era, despite a hiatus between the wars, because at one time most of the teaching and research staff at Japan's elite imperial universities were foreigners. The special foreign lecturerships have disappeared subsequent to the top-down government reforms in 2004 that forced the 87 national universities to become 'national university corporations' (NUCs). Surviving foreign lecturers--along with the foreign nationals hired to supplement the foreign lecturer system back in the 1990s--have either been integrated into the new competitive career structures of the post-reform university corporations (that is, tenure track, but not necessarily tenured), or they have joined the growing ranks of adjunct and contractual teachers and researchers. Many of the adjunct faculty and contract workers have joined since the NUCs were created.

Foreign lecturers and EFL

Since the first waves of 'massification' of the university in Japan in the 1970s, most foreign nationals have been hired to teach EFL. It should be remembered that EFL is an area of the curriculum that does not fit with traditional academic subjects, even in liberal arts and humanities. In the case of the many Japanese nationals assigned to teach EFL (because so many required courses have to be run for ALL students), most come from what are supposed to be related fields--English education (TEFL courses of study for future high school teachers), linguistics and literature. Even if a foreign national has a background in fields such as these, they will be expected to teach courses and in styles that COMPLEMENT what the Japanese faculty and adjunct personnel do.

There is, however, a problem with any analysis that says there is a clear expectation of some sort of complementary role. The problem is the lack of specific and explanatory documentation of just what it is most foreign nationals or their more numerous Japanese faculty counterparts actually do in class. The content of presentations at language teaching conferences in Japan (e.g., JALT and JACET) might be only a partial and even misleading indicator because applied linguistics (AL) and second language acquisition (SLA) studies produce a 'meta-discourse' about language teaching and language learning, much of it alienated from the actual goings-on of the classroom. AL and SLA have academic priority for most who study beyond a bachelor's degree or pursue publication in TEFL. So there is not much esteem accorded those who give presentations on the actual conduct of classes and course design.

Still, you might wonder if the actual dichotomy could be the following: Foreign nationals are native speakers who teach EFL communicatively and they use a lot of oral pair work. Meanwhile, Japanese nationals find it difficult to use a lot of English in their EFL classes because the natural means of communication amongst Japanese is the standard national language, especially in a formal setting such as a university class. The other problem with such an expectation is that Japanese faculty give much more emphasis to teaching of upper level and graduate school courses, the sort of which lends itself to scholarship in their their declared specialties (in foreign language pedagogy, linguistics or literature).

General English, EFL content teaching, and English for Specific Purposes

Another trend over the past decade or so has been for Japanese universities and colleges of all types to hire foreign nationals to teach regular subjects in English. Though many of the academics and scientists (not EFL/ELT specialists) hired to do such courses may not be aware, this really is content teaching for EFL. Here the boundaries amongst general EFL, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Science and Technology (at the numerous colleges of science), and content teaching all blur. However, it can not be emphasized enough that English really is a FOREIGN language for most Japanese, and not a means of regular communication in either oral or written forms. Therefore, content teaching in a foreign language in which most students have no proficiency is an uncomfortable fit with most academic programs.

Content classes in a foreign language are circumscribed by the need for well-planned language support and a scaled-down syllabus for the content that a course is supposed to cover. The teaching duties and classroom management for such content courses are often limited by the low-level English proficiencies of the students, so the courses have to be taught with stripped-down syllabi and the sort of structured language support that makes them, in effect, beginning level EFL classes, especially in terms of expression skills (speaking, writing, presentation skills, etc.). And given the average TOEIC scores of university populations (in a range of 400-500, at best), even a carefully planned, well-implemented approach to content teaching in EFL could very quickly prove worthless if most of the students in the class simply do not have the English proficiency required to learn a full-blown subject in a foreign language.

Remember this point, if you want to teach in Japan

It can not be emphasized enough that the main reason why there are a large number of jobs (both full-time and part-time) teaching EFL at universities and colleges in Japan is that so much English is a required subject. This is true of intensive programs, where some degree of mastery of English and other foreign languages might be expected (such as teacher training and cross-cultural studies courses). But it is also the case in the pervasive general education and liberal arts studies curricula, where EFL courses are more for familiarization and cross-cultural appreciation than for intensive study and or evaluated progress of language acquisition.

The national university system and the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' system

In addition to Japan's huge system of nearly 1000 private universities and colleges, the country has a system of 287 national and public (prefectural and municipal) four-year and two-year institutions. Of this total, the 87 national universities and 55 national technical colleges are in a period of imposed, top-down reform, reactive turmoil and even a transitional crisis, all of which would appear to be affecting the working conditions and career paths of their foreign personnel.

Full-time foreign nationals comprise only about 2-3% of the total full-time teaching staff at national universities and technical colleges, but the reforms affecting them are system-wide and could well usher in changes that will set precedents for the end of life-time employment for ALL the Japanese nationals teaching, researching and doing everyday administration at these institutions. In order to understand how the treatment of foreign nationals at the national universities might anticipate the changes that await ALL their personnel, a basic review of the system and the reforms it has undergone in the last decade might be useful.

An era of reform over-reach and a confusion of results

Prior to full corporatization, the national university system was reduced and consolidated in size from 99 to the current 87 universities (often through the merger of smaller national medical colleges and hospitals with the local national university). Because such mergers are still so recent, it remains unclear just how well integrated are the administration and operations of these forcibly joined pieces. For example, at one national university that was merged with a nearby medical college, the administration and faculty of the college of medicine have refused to allow lecturers and professors from the other parts of the university (a college of education and a college of engineering) to teach their students in many of the shared general education requirements, such as science, maths, Japanese, and EFL.

In addition to dissension over teaching and courses, combined finances are more complex and potentially more volatile. For example, the hospitals that come attached to the former medical colleges are often so heavily burdened with high-cost business operations that they could bankrupt the new NUCs. Without immediate reform, increased government subsidy, or an expanded ability to issue debt, the red ink at some of these hospitals could overwhelm the finances of the newly fledged combined institutions. This might give them such a bad credit rating that they couldn't issue bonds. So the NUCs which now have colleges and faculties of medicine have to establish 'firewalls' with the hospital operations while they try to move the provision of medical services into profit.

Most importantly, as of 1 April 2004, the national universities were 'denationalized' and incorporated into 'autonomous institutions' (or 'juridical persons'). The former national universities are now referred to in Japanese by a term that means something like 'national university juridical persons' but this translates better as 'National University Corporations'. The NUCs, at least in theory, have wider discretionary powers over personnel management, teaching and research assignments, program and curriculum development, and in the allocation of money for their mandated missions in teaching, conveying public services to their regions, and conducting basic and applied research in science and technology. This includes the already heated issue of being able to set tuition rates, which were, in the first year of independence, allowed to rise by a limit of up to 10%). Because of extensive--though diminishing-- national subsidy, the tuition rates (about US $5000) are currently about 64% of the average of private universities (about US $7800). In the next decade the most likely trend is that public and national universities will lose more and more of their government subsidies. Their tuition will increase to a level closer to the private universities--even as the more numerous private universities will be under pressure to reduce their rates to compete for fewer and fewer students.

Government goals: cut civil servant payrolls, save money, spin off
universities

Denationalization was intended to rationalize, streamline, centralize, and inject executive decision-making into the national universities by empowering presidents to act as the chief officers in charge, with new entities for accountability and evaluation. Traditionally, many aspects of governance in the national and public tertiary systems have amounted to a cumbersome, consensual, collegial process of department meetings, committees, faculty meetings, and votes across the professoriates (or full faculty councils) of the several colleges that comprise a university. This bottom-up, consensual set of processes, then, has had to be co-ordinated with or give way to the priorities and prerogatives of the national government and its ministry of education. Or, in the case of public universities, collegial management had to be reconciled with prefectural and municipal governments, including local assemblies or legislatures. Of course, one important goal which looms over the university reforms is to make the institutions cost MUCH LESS as QUICKLY as possible. If they become more self-financing, the debt-ridden national government can further reduce its subsidy to them.

Personnel policies have been characterized as particularly wasteful and inflexible (that is, costly), and two strategies were immediately floated to make the NUCs more financially 'flexible': predictably enough, they are raising tuition while cutting staff. National universities and technical colleges only educate about 22% of the tertiary system's total 3.1 million students, yet they account for almost 40% of the sector's 176,000 full-time 'educators' (a share inflated, however, by the many faculty being assigned to scientific research as well as day-to-day administrative duties).

Much of the excess for which the universities are blamed, though, is really the national government's fault: during the last ten years, it encouraged the universities to hire more researchers and support personnel in order to staff their expanding research infrastructure, and, when it consolidated its separate, bloated system of national research centers in the 1990s, it shunted unproductive researchers (many with no teaching experience) to the colleges of science and engineering at the national universities.

Also, with corporatization has come the loss of civil servant status of the university faculty and with it one of the elements of job protection that full-time public employees universally receive in Japan. At the national universities, academic tenure was never the same as what might be found at an American university. That is, at least for Japanese nationals hired for full-time teaching and/or research, a permanent position and incremental rises in stature came by virtue of their full-time civil servant status and seniority, so tenure was neither very competitive nor limited to a select fraction but rather extended to most everyone. However, although national university faculty were allowed to form and join unions, collective bargaining was always severely circumscribed by law, since civil servants are not permitted to strike.

Now that the faculty are no longer civil servants, the unanswered question is whether or not their unions and representatives at collective bargaining will reconstitute themselves in forms strong and unified enough for effective industrial action. Certainly many Japanese nationals at the NUCS and PUCs, having lost their civil servant status, are becoming more aware of many of the employment and career issues that foreign nationals have long had to struggle with.

For example, for years Japanese faculty seemed unconcerned about the hiring of 'dispatch' instructors to run general education service courses such as 'General English'. As full-time civil servants, such moves to outsource really didn't affect or threaten them. Once they lost their civil servant status, however, many could see the issue as a sort of 'thin edge of the wedge'. If departments and faculties give up their obligation to manage the evaluation of applicants and hiring of teachers in English, then why not outsource other areas as well? Little wonder then that the faculties and now the Ministry of Education have found agreement on this issue, and there has been a move to stop dispatch hiring and outsourcing. Still, since this is 'guidance' ('daigaku kijun') suggesting what is and what is not acceptable, the only way it could change the picture at the more numerous private universities would be strong enforcement. That would require the Ministry of Education to take radical steps, such as threatening to de-certify the private institutions which refuse to follow its guidance against dispatch teachers and outsourcing.

Varied results of reforms spell trouble for foreign nationals

It is still too early to tell just how centralized and top-down the former national universities' administrations have actually become. However, inconsistencies in the restructuring, re-hiring and/or termination of foreign personnel might indicate that the reform liberalization and corporatization have actually created a power vacuum. For example, the national government and its education ministry had already withdrawn a lot of support for its nationwide 'gaikokujin kyoshi' system in the 1990s, which resulted in many older foreign nationals losing their posts because they were deemed to be too expensive to be paid full-time salaries until their retirement. So as soon as the national universities had been re-established as corporations, the ministry signaled that the 'autonomous' universities should phase out all their 'gaikokujin kyoshi' positions in two years and adopt their own policies and systems in keeping with their own teaching and research requirements and finances. At the same time, down-sizing and restructuring the civil service was achieved through these reforms to the national university system, even before the more famous privatization of the postal system. The NUCs' management of personnel shifted from being a function of the national government's civil servant system (the cabinet-level National Personnel Authority) to the much weaker oversight of the Bureau of Labor Standards (under the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare).

However, rather than there being an adoption of one unified policy across a centrally administered university, what is often evident is from the period of 2004-7 is localization and divergence taken to confusing extremes: foreign lectureship posts were phased out or re-assigned in different ways even within single departments and programs! Multiply these varying results across several departments and then again by several faculties, and it becomes obvious that there really is little agreement or top-down authority at many former national universities regarding how to phase out, renew and restructure the foreign lectureship system. Ironically, one reason for the flurry of centrifugal results might be the worry that a systematic reorganization of foreign personnel could possibly set a policy precedent that would then be applied vigorously to the Japanese nationals.

Because of the ongoing proliferation of arrangements for ending the current 'gaikokujin kyoshi' system, it is as yet very difficult to highlight one trend from all the former national universities that would enable a prediction about what is going to happen in the future. Some foreign personnel have been offered lectureships and assistant and associate professorships in such specialties as 'foreign language teaching', with reduced salaries but long-term career structure (whatever that might now mean given the loss of civil servant status). Others are being forced out as their posts become contractual and not renewable, although some have been offered the chance to compete for a new post if one is created. Or the 'gaikokujin kyoushi' type job could be filled by internationals taking up instructorships, lecturerships and assistant professorships, but, in effect, kept to three-year limits with unwritten, 'implicit' contracts, possibly renewed once (for a maximum of six years). Another phenomenon appears to be fewer full-time foreigners teaching such subjects as EFL and cultural studies, with their teaching duties more and more taken over by cheaper part-time personnel or 'dispatch' workers from commercial English conversation schools.

A new system for ALL emerging?

A controversial consolidation and downsizing at a public university might hold the key to detecting a pattern in all this apparent divergence of outcomes. There are 86 public universities and 47 two-year colleges in Japan run and funded by prefectural and municipal governments. These lesser known public universities and colleges have often been established to extend certain types of subsidized higher education to relatively remote regions where private institutions are too expensive or do not exist. They also may be situated near national universities but provide educations that complement the science, engineering and teacher training programmes of national universities with ones in the social sciences, business, and in some vocations, such as agriculture, fisheries, and nursing and medical technician programs.

Because of the political popularity of 'reform' during times of economic troubles and the reality of even worsening finances at many local governments, public tertiary institutions have been forced into corporatization, with the national universities as a model. Starting in 1 April 2005 many began the tedious and time-consuming process of being re-established along the lines of the NUCs, although separation is from a lower, smaller level of government. For example, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has proposed the establishment of a new public university through the consolidation of four existing institutions into one; the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Technology, Tokyo Metropolitan University of Health Sciences, and Tokyo Metropolitan College would all be merged with the prestigious Tokyo Metropolitan University.

Nationwide the main problem that emerged with the corporatization of the public universities was that there was no one central authority from which power could be 'devolved'. The national government, through its ministry of education, certainly has more authority over public universities than it does the much more extensive private system because the public universities are dependent on government funding. But much of the funding is directed through a further layer of local government rather than there being any direct relationship between the institutions and a national ministry. Because of the relatively weak and diffuse authority of local governments in Japan, privatization of the public universities has not gone as quickly or smoothly as reform advocates would have liked.

Many of the faculty at all the institutions affected by the consolidation and reform of institutions under the control of Tokyo Metropolitan Government have objected vociferously and effectively to the proposed imposition of performance-based pay and five-year contracts. Those who objected refused to sign agreements for course assignments, which the administration needs in order to apply to the national government for approval in establishing the new public university. The professors and lecturers demanded, among other things, that faculty councils retain control of teaching appointments and that full-time teachers not be forced to submit to the five-year contracts. At the heart of the conflict between the administration and the faculty was the desire of the former to restructure faculties in order to offer new courses of study at both undergraduate and graduate levels focused on 'urban' themes which might appeal to a demographically declining pool of applicants (i.e., urban liberal arts, urban environment sciences, system design, and health services). Many of the affected faculty objected to the proposed heavier load of introductory level classes with larger numbers of students to teach and evaluate.

Foreign lecturers become the test case at one former national university

Although the national universities were forced to lead the way in privatization and corporatization, the plan to combine public institutions in Tokyo is considered a model case which could be applied as 'best practice' for management in the reorganization and streamlining of both public and former national universities nationwide. The proposals for five-year contracts and merit pay for teachers has drawn special attention.

The contract-and-competitive-tenure system that the Tokyo Metropolitan government is now attempting to impose on the teaching faculties of its universities and colleges has its antecedents. The plan comes from an idea put forward at national research centers and at the former national universities in order to 'invigorate' government-funded research. It most likely originally comes from private industry and private universities (who were the first to use the status for educators). This is the so-called 'tokunin' system whereby researchers sign contracts (usually five years for researchers, but often three years for teachers). Renewal--leading to a possible career track position--depends upon review processes and documentation of 'successful results', such as the development of patents and commercial applications stemming from the initial period of research. However, it is questionable whether such a system is the most appropriate for the professional development of university teachers, nor is it clear how their performance under such a 'tokunin' system can be effectively and objectively evaluated.

The administrations of the one-year-old NUCs, however, have appeared to be reluctant to propose such a system for their teaching personnel. That reluctance may have changed recently, and the largely powerless foreign lecturers became the test case. As of April 2005, University of Kobe, a former national university now a NUC, adopted a 'tokunin kyoin' system for its former 'gaikokujin kyoshi', limiting them to a three-year contract and no automatic renewal (though they will be allowed to try for the position should it be re-opened to new candidates).

Some concluding remarks about more numerous private universities

The employment conditions of foreign nationals within Japan's more extensive private system of universities and two-year colleges (together totaling some 996 institutions) vary a lot. This makes concise generalizations nearly impossible, except to say that there is a broad range of policies and practices. Let us take a lot at what such a vague statement might actually mean if you are going to teach at a private university or college in Japan.

At one extreme, the bad one, discrimination is obviously rampant: unlike their Japanese counterparts, foreign personnel might (1) face arbitrary dismissal, (2) have short-term contracts with strict renewal limits imposed, (3) receive lower salaries, no bonuses and more severe pay cuts, (4) be barred from meetings where decisions are made, and (5) be denied health insurance and retirement benefits (since employers avoid paying their share of the national insurance).

Any charge of chauvinist prejudice, however, has to be qualified because the administrations of some private universities and colleges are so dictatorial and their unions so weak that even Japanese nationals can face arbitrarily imposed employment conditions and unfair labor practices, such as the abuse of contracts or unjustified job termination. Moreover, the very numerous part-time personnel (who often do more teaching than full-time faculty), regardless of nationality, have very little control over their situations and fewer employment rights or benefits.

At the other end of the spectrum for management-employee relations at private institutions, internationals teaching EFL (or content courses in EFL) might receive equal treatment, on par with Japanese nationals. This entails things like tenure-track leading to permanent positions, full benefits such as health insurance, retirement and bonuses, and perhaps most importantly, the extension of collegiality in decision-making.

At the internationalized end of the range of private universities, such enviable conditions seem to be most noticeable in their rarity, often limited to universities or colleges with full-blown foreign language and cultural studies program and the financial resources and business plans to support them. Now there is a need for input from qualified and committed foreign nationals in an era when the numbers of open slots for matriculation exceed applicants and each new enrollment is hotly contested by a rival institution or program. A producer-consumer relationship, however, can be a problematic one for normal academic achievement. It might prove an even more troubled one for low-ranked teachers with no job protection assigned large general education classes of beginning-level students who only study a foreign language like English because it is required.

ELT in Japan, Issue 1, Feature Article: "Native Writing Systems: Positive Transfer or Interference for EFL Learning?"

Native Writing Systems: Positive Transfer or Interference for EFL Learning?
by Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan



Click on the links below and the page will load as a graphic in your browser.


Page 1 of 'Native Writing Systems'

Page 2 of 'Native Writing Systems'

Page 3 of 'Native Writing Systems'

Page 4 of 'Native Writing Systems'


See also the previously published article on 'katakana eigo'. 

Labels: phonics, whole language, writing systems, native literacy, native language arts, positive transfer, (negative)

ELT in Japan, Issue 1, Feature Article: "Do Japanese EFL students need 'katakana eigo' to learn and to read English?"

Please note that towards the end of the article three classroom activities are explained. 

ELT-J Issue Feature Article:


Do Japanese EFL students need katakana eigo to learn and to read English?
by Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan

Introduction

'Katakana' is one of two syllabaries used in modern written Japanese; it is largely used to represent non-Chinese loan words, such as the numerous English loan words in Japanese called 'gairaigo'. It is also used in some contexts to stand for native onomatopoeia and other mimetic language, to show emphasis in a written text, to transcribe the readings of Chinese characters in legal documents, to provide a quickly input language for telegraphy, and to represent the popular names of animals and plants in native taxonomy, among other uses. However, katakana also finds widespread use in EFL in Japan in classrooms and materials as 'katakana eigo', which is a syllabic transliteration of English into a form that is more easily decodable for learners.

For the sake of this article's discussion, teacher attitudes toward katakana eigo can be summarized as the following three:

1. Katakana eigo is bad, and we should ban it.
2. Katakana eigo is not particularly useful, but it is part of the cross-lingual (L2 to L1)
reality, still let us not encourage it.
3. Katakana eigo is a useful crutch; helping students as a cognitive bridge to literacy in
EFL, so let us adapt it appropriately.

In this article I will explain why learners feel that katakana eigo is necessary in order to deal with the complexity and inconsistency of written English, and I will explain how teachers can plan and use content, materials and activities that will alleviate the need for such L1 crutches.

Katakana eigo: Is it natural?

It is natural for beginners to make substitutions and simplifications with the FL's sound system and sound tactics. Nonnative/JSL/JFL speakers of Japanese (many of them English teachers in Japan) are no different on this point. It is also a matter of course that students might take a very familiar, consistent, phonologically transparent, syllabic script like katakana and use it to transcribe a language written in one that is not so easy to decode for pronunciation (like the complex, alphabetic writing conventions of English). It does seem possible, though, that a persistent reliance on katakana eigo during beginning levels of instruction reinforces the idea that English does not have its own sound system and sound tactics. The impression that beginners might get is that the sounds and sound tactics of English are easily fitted into those of Japanese; they are not, not if intelligibility is to survive.

In standard phonological accounts, spoken Japanese has far fewer sound segments than English, and simpler tactics are used for putting these sounds together into syllables and words. A typical Japanese syllable is V or CV type; few consonant sounds can close a syllable, and there are not many consonant clusters. A writing system such as katakana that is based on an analysis of the syllable types of spoken Japanese, therefore, proves an ill fit for spoken English. What is at issue is the mental, phonological representations of the FL in the minds of the learners which enable them to learn and use it.

Here are two examples of how katakana eigo renders English into a Japanese form. Take the word 'banana'. In Japanese, this word would be written as three syllabic characters,, which we can romanize as ba-na-na. In this case the written Japanese corresponds perfectly with the English (though note, the Japanese form of this word would be given fairly even stress across all three syllables, while the English word typically receives the strongest stress on the second syllable with fairly neutral vowels in the first and final syllables). But look what happens with a second example, 'McDonald's'. In Japanese, this would be written as, which as romanized is ma-ku-do-na-ru-do. Now, both the words 'banana' and 'McDonald's' are well established loan words in modern spoken Japanese, and, as such, the nativized pronunciations of these for spoken Japanese are perfectly legitimate. But it is easy to see from these two examples what might happen to English words in an EFL setting if students used katakana to make target vocabulary more easily 'decodable'. If a word has a similar syllable structure to Japanese (V or CV), then the effects are not so profound. In the case of a word like 'McDonald's', the English word with three syllables becomes a six-syllable word with all open syllables and extra, intruded vowel sounds.

Is it possible that once such word forms are learned for EFL, that they make a lot of vocabulary of English largely incomprehensible? First, students, having learned the Japanized version of a word, may not recognize it while listening (or even reading, if they find the katakana for more easily memorized than English spelling). Second, if students produce such forms, are most English speakers outside of an EFL classroom in Japan going to understand them?

Next, let us turn to possible solutions that we might consider for teaching methods and materials. If katakana eigo is banned in class, this decision is a school's departmental or teacher's choice. However, we must also remain aware of two separate parts of linguistic reality in Japan, where English is both an important source of loan words and a much-studied FL. First, students are still going to make sound substitutions from Japanese and their own developing interlanguage when speaking and reading English out loud.

It is a natural linguistic phenomenon for beginners to struggle with the phonology of English when they start to learn the language. Construction and internalization of a FL's phonology goes along step-by-step with development in things like vocabulary and grammar (though sometimes the steps are backwards and not always forward). Second, English loan words become visible and usable in Japanese because they have been transcribed into katakana eigo form. Teachers working in an EFL environment have to recognize and affirm that there are quite legitimate processes going on when their students' L1 acquires a loan word from English. Moreover, it is expected for someone to use the L1's pronunciation of English loan words when speaking the L1 (including native English speakers when they speak Japanese).

Is Phonics a Possible Solution?

Phonics often refers to a set of methods for teaching beginning literacy to native English speakers, bilinguals and ESL learners in countries where English is the dominant language. In such methods teachers typically emphasize the rule-like nature of spelling-to-sound correspondences through direct instruction and practice. To many critics, the problems with phonics include the following: (a) too much emphasis on explicit rules and teacher-centered instruction of them, (b) a simplistic view of the nature of written English's complex and irregular spelling conventions, and (c) behaviorist drill and practice separated from real language use and meaning.

Given such problems, it might seem difficult to reconcile phonics methods with constructivist, student-centered, communicative EFL instruction. However, let us consider a different view of what phonics might be since it will help us to integrate phonics into our both our philosophies as well as our real world teaching. Goodman (1993) writes:

Phonics is always both personal and social, because we must build relationships between our own personal speech . . .the speech of our community and the social conventions of writing. It is always contextual because the values of both sound and letter patterns change in the phonological, grammatical and meaning contexts they occur in. And it's never more than part of the process of reading and writing. For all these reasons, phonics is learned best in the course of learning to read and write, not as a prerequisite. In fact, our phonics is determined by our speaking, listening, reading and writing experiences.(p. 51)

If we can agree with Goodman here, then we can see that phonics is not a set of simple rules for letter-to-sound correspondences "reversed engineered" from written English that teachers can then present and drill in to students. Rather, phonics is a complex system of relationships that the learner as reader and writer builds up and internalizes mentally; much like the other parts of a learner's FL language system, it could be said to exist only when language is being used in some way to make meaning.

A Few Notes on the Spelling of English

One of the reasons why doubts about phonics as something teachable arise has to do with the nature of English orthography and the ways it might be processed and read in real written text. The first fact that confronts us is inescapable: a simple alphabet relates one symbol with one categorical sound (sound segment, phoneme or phone). But the version of the Roman alphabet used to write English has only 26 letters, far short of the number necessary to represent spoken English's list of 44 to 48 sounds in simple one-sound-to-one-symbol conventions. This means that, while English is written alphabetically, these conventions are not limited to simple one-letter-to-one-sound correspondences. The second fact only makes matters seem worse: not only are the conventions complex, but there is a great deal of irregularity and inconsistency (more so than written French even, another literary language known to deviate from simple phonetic principles).

One reason for the complexity is that, at least in part, the spelling patterns do capture phonological aspects of the spoken language, but since there is a shortage of roman letters for English sounds, the conventions are by necessity complex. However, how do we account for the inconsistencies and irregularities? Historic and linguistic reasons can be given: at one time the writing conventions for writing Anglo-Saxon and British Danish were fairly phonemic, but these traditions died out and so are not really continuous with written English as we know it today. Then Norman French, after 1066, brought with it French spelling conventions and massive amounts of Latinate vocabulary.

Next, the subsequent age of mass literacy and printing accompanied the true emergence of modern English as a world language. During this period, English's strange mix of spelling conventions -- after infusions of even more Latinate vocabulary from writers such as Milton and exotic spelling conventions from Dutch printers and typesetters -- became frozen in place more or less. Written English curiously upholds both phonemic/phonological and etymological principles (the latter being a striking parallel with modern French). Most words have not lost their sound shapes in their written forms, but often spellings are stable across word roots, even though internal vowels change. For example, compare the stable spellings and unstable pronunciations of the related lexical roots of these words: phone, phonic, phonological, telephony, etc.

The tendency is for the complex processes of lexical derivation and grammatical morphology in English to produce many changes in pronunciation of syllable-internal vowel sounds while the spelling conventions refer more often consistently to word roots. It is this mix of conventions that leads some to theorize that English could be read at a word level in mature, fluent reading processes.

Ways to Cope in the Classroom

It may well be the case that written English as it is actually read, written and spelled forces the literate language user to juggle phonological and word-level principles. However, there is also the possibility that beginning literacy--especially in a SL or FL, where so much vocabulary is encountered for the first time in print, not speech--has to be more dependent on phonological processes in reading. The good news is that the spelling conventions for the English consonants sounds, while complex, are fairly consistent. The true source of difficulty is more centered on how the vowels of English are written.

Here are three activities that teachers can run with beginning to lower intermediate level learners of all ages to practice and reinforce phonics, pronunciation and phonological skills related to beginning EFL learning and literacy.

Activity One: Pronunciation and Phonics Crambo (an adaptation of a traditional spelling game)

1. Preparation: Go through student word lists (e.g., the lexical part of the syllabus of a course book) and select words that fit major and minor spelling patterns. Also, choose key sight words (which are also a major part of a beginner's vocabulary). Think of other rhyming words that students may not know, but that fit the patterns that the course vocabulary illustrate.

2. Preteaching: Explain/show what an English rhyme is, as Japanese students may have difficulty with the concept. Young learners especially may be quite open to language play, but their linguistic sense of it will be geared to the characteristics of Japanese, not English. Rhyme is one of these characteristics on which English and Japanese (but also Romance languages like Spanish and Italian) differ greatly. Show them how words can rhyme and have the same spelling pattern: e.g., time, lime, dime, etc. Also show them how words can rhyme but have totally different spellings: e.g., time, rhyme, climb. You can also show them how common sight words complicate matters still further: two, you, who.

3. Divide the class into teams. I have used this activity a lot for classes that could be divided into two teams, but more teams than that are possible. Two players from each team can come to the board. One will write for their team, while the other can relay information from the rest of the team members. This activity can be run having students rely solely on memory, or they can be encouraged to use textbooks, glossaries and dictionaries for the words they will need. Begin play by announcing a key word and writing it top, center on the board. Repeat the word several times. The first team to write a correct rhyme wins a point. Continue play with different team members rotating for each round. Emphasize that this is a team effort, so the members who are at their seats should give assistance to the two at the board.

4. Variations: Practice words that have the same vowel sound but do not rhyme. Or words that begin or end with the same target sound, such as problem sounds like /r/ or /l/ (in this case you will want only to say the key word several times and not write anything on the board).

Activity Two: Spelling Concentration (an EFL adaptation of Concentration)

1. Construct a set of word cards from large pieces of cardboard (I have used A4 and B4 sizes). On one side of each card print a key word. The words on the cards should be organized so that there are matching pairs of rhyming words or words that share the same internal vowel sounds (e.g., same soundsame spelling, same sounddifferent spelling, selected sight words). For example, in one set of cards I matched in non-rhymes, five pairs of short vowels (bad-cat, bed-pet, sit-tip, not-top, cut-cup), five pairs of 'long' vowels (ate-day, feet-heat, kite-sight, note-boat, room-tune), and three pairs with other vowels (out-town, loop-soon, boy-oil) for a total of 26 cards. After you have written all the key words on the cards, shuffle the deck thoroughly, then number the cards at random on their reverse sides, from 1 to 26. Tape or magnetically fix the word cards to the blackboard with the numbered sides showing.

2. This game works best if played between two teams, but team sizes should be kept down to groups that are small enough for all to participate. If you team teach, you might want to split up a large class and run two different games. There is not a lot of preteaching required for this game if the previous activity has already been done (teaching what words rhyme, how they might share an internal vowel, how they might begin or end with the same sound, etc.). You might want to run a demonstration round to show how the Concentration game will go.

3. One of the two teams must begin play; this can be decided at random since going first does not increase the odds of winning. The side that starts picks any two cards by calling out their numbers (this also gives beginners a chance to say the numerals in English out loud in real communication). The teacher (or appointed M.C.) turns the cards over so that they display their key words. The teacher says the words out loud several times so that the whole class can hear. If the two words on the cards match according to the teaching point of the game (e.g., rhymes, internal vowel sounds, initial sounds, final sounds, etc.), the two cards are taken down and given to the side that chose them. If cards are won, play continues with the same side getting the chance to call out two more numbers. The turn changes if two cards are turned over but the words do not match. Keep playing until all the cards have been matched and given to a side.

4. Hint on making this game work: point out to the teams that they need to split up memorization duties among their members; however, do not let them keep any written notes.

Activity Three: Phonics Snap (an EFL adaptation of the card game, Snap!)

1. Prepare a list of words from student vocabulary. Select these words on the basis of the spelling patterns they illustrate (for example, the most basic patterns of the five short vowels and the five long vowels). Think of words that both rhyme and illustrate the same spelling patterns and add them to the list (they may be from previously studied vocabulary, or they can be new words that should be decodable if phonics skills are used). Using the words you have collected, construct a set of 72 cards, one word on each card. The object of this game depends on randomly matching rhyming words, so be sure to include a large number of only a few rhymes (for example, a deck that is limited to the major patterns for the five long vowels). In short, this game does not work if there aren't enough examples of each rhyme. Because of the complexity of English spelling, it is possible to construct games to emphasize many different points. Some possibilities might include: rhymes with the same spelling, rhymes with different spellings, or rhymes with various spellings along with an occasional sight word, which should always come from known vocabulary (for example, eye might be matched with pie, my and buy).

2. This game is best played in pairs. Decks for an entire class could be used while the teacher checks how students are doing. Also, the teacher could play this game with a student who needs extra practice with English spelling and pronunciation. Team teaching would allow for this game to be used with a larger class. The two teachers could demonstrate it better, and they could cover more of the classroom when helping students learn to play it.

3. Have students form pairs. Distribute one deck of cards to each pair. After shuffling and dealing the cards (face down), one player begins play by placing their top card face up on the desk and pronouncing the word (e.g. 'light'). The other player then lays a card on top of the previous one and pronounces it (e.g. late). Play continues in turn until a rhyming card has been laid on top of the previous one (e.g., seen then bean). At that instant, the first player to recognize the rhyme and say 'Snap!' wins all the cards that have been laid. Players should not cheat by looking at their cards before they lay them, a point that should be stressed when the game is demonstrated and monitored. Players keep doing this until one player has won all the cards.

4. Other principles could be practiced with this game; for example, the same internal vowel sound in nonrhyming words ('feet' and 'bean').

Conclusion

It is understandable that students would want to resort to using katakana transcriptions of English to make the language they are studying clearer for decoding into pronunciations. Also, it is perfectly legitimate when this process is used to bring English loan words into Japanese. However, katakana eigo is of limited use for beginning literacy in real written English, and may well hinder language development, since it distorts perceptions of English pronunciation. Phonics can be used to lessen the need for things like katakana eigo, but it must be remembered that phonics is not simply some neat set of rules that teachers give to students. Rather, just as with the acquisition of any generative, patterned, rule-like aspect to a language, students must be given the opportunities to build up skills and abilities that they can actually apply to understanding and making meaning in the FL. Activities such as the three outlined in this article should help teachers to do just that.


References
Goodman, Kenneth S. (1993). Phonics phacts. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

ELT-J, Issue 1, Feature Article: "Ten Reasons Why English Learning in Japan Fails"

 Access to the entire issue 1 of ELT-J can be found at the following link:


http://eltinjapan.blogspot.com/2009/12/elt-in-japan-issue-1-december-2009.html


This is the lead feature article of issue 1:


TEN REASONS WHY ENGLISH LEARNING IN JAPAN FAILS
Charles Jannuzi, University of Fukui, Japan

Introduction

It is hoped that the ten reasons listed here are comprehensive enough to take in most of the important factors involved in making an analysis such as this. In summary form, the ten MAIN reasons are the following:

1. Japan is linguistically and culturally self-sufficient--so most Japanese do not have a pressing need to learn or use English (English is a FOREIGN language), nor is English used much for social or communication purposes in Japan--certainly not between Japanese.


2. Japanese is not closely related to English--so it takes longer for beginners to learn how to learn English than learners with an Indo-European language background.

3. Japanese is not written with an alphabet--this makes literacy for EFL a hindrance to learning the language. If you try checking to see if your students even know alphabetical order or how to touchtype using a standard alphabetic keyboard, then you will see just how big a factor this is.

4. Learning to read and write Japanese fluently takes away too much time and effort from the rest of the curriculum, including EFL learning.

5. Lack of national consensus on foreign language education--most agree change is needed, but it is hard to get agreement on concrete steps.

6. The situation at universities--negative washback from entrance exams and the preparation for them at the senior highs.

7. The situation at universities regarding teacher-student relations, backgrounds, goals--i.e., elite academics, non-elite students, mismatch of expectations, poor results with general education studies.


8. A lack of EFL programs, specialties, majors, minors, concentrations. There is plenty of 'General English'. Indeed, that is one of the bitter irony of teaching EFL in Japan. Many of us have jobs because English is required, but we end up wasting far too much time and effort trying to teach students who are in class only because they have to be or have a vague idea that they want to study English with a foreigner.


9. The foreign language teaching and learning 'culture'. That is, the overall approach to teaching and learning EFL (and these are collaborative activities) that is specific to Japan. Japanese EFL teachers tend towards 'yaku-doku', which could be called a version of 'grammar-translation'. Meanwhile, foreign teachers are drawn to mostly production activities--conversational pair practice--for which there is little or no accountability in terms of evaluation.

10. The language teaching 'profession' in Japan. There is a lack of serious and useful teacher training and professional development. In higher education, those who are most often designated to teach EFL courses have backgrounds in literature, linguistics, and teacher training, not actual EFL teaching. If asked, many will even say that they are not EFL teachers and are not interested in teaching EFL.

A more detailed explanation and discussion of the ten reasons follows.


Reason 1: Japan is linguistically and culturally self-sufficient

Japan is linguistically and culturally self-sufficient.

That is an overstatement because modern, developed Japan clearly imports and assimilates ideas, cultural products, technology, etc. from the rest of the world. It does this in much the same way many developed countries do. However, that does not mean I agree with the long-held view that Japan (and other Asian cultures) are simply imitators, not originators. That is one of those numerous self-swallowing, clichéd assumptions held by many that one could waste a lifetime arguing against because one has to assume it is true simply to discuss it.

So let us look at some basic facts. Japan has a population of just under 128 million; that makes it one of the world's 'populous' countries. It is also the world's number two political economy in terms of size and always ranks high in per capita measurements and development indicators.

Most of Japan's relatively large population is considered 'native-born' Japanese. This description also could be used to include the single largest ethnic group, 'Korean'. Despite considerable dialect variation in the spoken language (including Okinawan, which could be considered a separate language or group of dialects) , most native-born Japanese learn and use a standard dialect of Japanese for education, literacy, and formal social relations (such as the conduct of business).

Unlike a country with a relatively small population, Japan's national language is not threatened--not even perturbed--by such phenomena as 'global English'. Most Japanese do not need to access directly information, news and innovative ideas from outside their culture through the use of global English. Instead, most Japanese live in a country that uses translation and interpretation on an enormous, commercial scale in order to bring in outside information.

In addition to translation and interpretation, there is another important process that keeps Japan using Japanese almost exclusively. The Japanese language brings in a large amount of vocabulary from foreign languages. The first main source is Chinese. The impact of Chinese on modern Japanese is something like that of Norman French and Latin on modern English.

The second main source providing new vocabulary (and sound sequences too) is English. A good indication of the level to which Japanese 'nativizes' the English it borrows is the role elements acquired from English's lexicon now play in the derivation of new words for the lexicon of Japanese. This is sometimes called 'Japlish'.

Some of these new Japanese Japlish terms have even made it back into English, at least amongst the people who are interested in Japan: OL, salaryman, anime, etc. This sort of phenomenon is hardly unique. First, the Japanese language has already done it quite prominently with morphemes got from long-term contact with Chinese (for example, the Japanese term for 'automobile', 'ji-dou-sha'). Second, look at how new terms in English are derived from discrete elements from Latin and Greek (sometimes the two different types are joined together based on English's own rules for lexical derivation).

Despite the concern of language conservatives that foreign influences are overwhelming Japanese, one could plausibly argue the exact opposite: Because Japanese so readily adopts and adapts vocabulary and morphemes originally from English, the language has become enriched, nuanced and even more capable of expressing ideas and information. Therefore, loan words help to make Japan and Japanese linguistically self-sufficient and lessen the need for most Japanese to engage meaning directly in a foreign language.

Now some proponents and enthusiasts of globalization have said that translation and interpretation can not keep up with the proliferation of new knowledge in order to integrate and assimilate it across cultures and languages. So the concept of 'global English' has been enlisted in support of the larger mission of globalization. A basic formulation is the following: Japan must drastically raise its overall low level of English in its population in order to compete with developed and newly industrialized countries. Some in the government and education have even called for the adoption of English as Japan's official second language.

But most people are going to be practical about knowledge and learning EFL. If they need English to get knowledge, they will try to learn English. That can be stated even more specifically. If they need English to get USABLE knowledge and information for their jobs and personal lives, they will try to learn English.

Another important factor is the non-linguistic aspect of cross-cultural, cross-linguistic contact: that is the social side, or human relations. Since most human relations are created and maintained in Japan using a form of Japanese, there is very little need for inter-personal communication in English.

A good indicator of Japan's relative cultural and linguistic self-sufficiency is its ability to export cultural products, such as J-Pop music, films, television dramas, manga/comics, and anime/animated films.

Reason 2: Japanese is not closely related to English

Japanese is not closely related to English.

Language families

What people usually mean by this is that English and Japanese are not from the same language family groups, and that Japanese does not belong to the Indo-European super-family of languages. It is fairly common knowledge among Japanese as well as the foreigners who flock to study Japanese (Japanese as a Foreign Language, JFL) that Japanese is not closely related to any other languages. Actually, what some recent linguistics says is that Japanese and Ryuukuan are members of the larger 'Japonic' family. So technically, modern Japanese (and all its dialects) has a relative, the Ryuukuan language (and all its dialects). At a popular level in Japan, Ryuukuan is often equated with Okinawan, and Okinawan is thought of as one of the many spoken dialects of Japan. The fact that most Okinawans also speak and are literate in standard forms of Japanese only reinforces the popular view, since the same thing could be said about most Japanese. That is, they speak a local and individual variation of a regional dialect, and learn and use standard forms of Japanese for education, business, literacy, etc.

Clearly, we can say English is not closely related to Japonic or Japanese. English is often referred to as a Germanic language. This makes it a sister language of Dutch, Flemish, German, Icelandic, etc. Others might note the close lexical and typographical resemblances modern English has with Romance languages, such as French, Italian and Spanish. You might say that modern English SOUNDS like a Germanic language, but LOOKS like a Romance one because of the Latinate vocabulary and the fossilized French-looking spelling conventions.

Comparing and contrasting Japanese and English

In foreign language education in Japan, English and Japanese often get placed side-by-side for comparison and contrast. This is true of much of the content of EFL classes in Japan, from junior high/middle school to university-level. You could call this the type of linguistic analysis for pedagogical purposes that is thought to support the learning of English, but it is also for the purpose of comparative cultures. In the realm of comparative cultures and cross-cultural learning, reference is most often made to 'American' (but also 'British') English as a standard form for learning EFL. Such an emphasis can be misleading, but it is understandable enough given the relative importance of English as a 'global language' and the global impact of American culture. The fact that the US has a population that is much larger than the UK's, Canada's, Australia's, New Zealand's and Ireland's also deserves consideration.

Unlike modern English, which is demonstrably related to known groups of languages, modern Japanese can be called a language 'isolate' of somewhat obscure origins. Origins of modern languages can be very obscure in the absence of literacy and textual artifacts. And even these have a distorting effect, since we still can not recover fully the spoken language. Such is the case of Japanese. More technically, it should be said that 'Japonic' is the actual family and isolate, and that Japonic consists of Japanese (and all its dialects) and Ryuukyuan (and all its dialects).

English can be classified into relationships with west Germanic languages as well as the larger Germanic grouping. This then allows English to be put into a relationship with a 'super-family' that has penetrated the popular consciousness of language, the Indo-European languages. This means that it can be said that English shares ancestry with German, but also Latin and Greek. However, this also means English shares a line of linguistic descent that stems from an historic super-family of languages that also has lines of descent in Russian and other Slavic languages, as well as languages considered 'exotic' by many Americans or British, such as Albanian, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashtun, Indo-Persian, Hindi and Urdu.

Reinforcing this view that there is a 'Indo-European' nature to English is English's history. English has a long history of language-changing contact with other languages, but the most extensive contacts have been with other Indo-European languages (Celtic, North Germanic, Norman French, literary Latin, etc.)

Like English, Japanese is a 'contact' language. In the case of Japanese, though, the exact nature of the cross-linguistic contact is obscure until literacy practices, a writing system and large amounts of vocabulary were adopted from China. Modern Japanese is most likely a literary creole that is in its origins the results of contact (or waves of contacts) due to human migrations to the archipelago. (Much the same could be said about how modern English was formed.) In the case of proto-Japanese, migrations were followed by cross-cultural consolidations across speakers of N.E. Asian (non-Chinese) languages, S. Asian (non-Chinese) ones, Pacific ones, and ones already spoken on the Japanese islands before the migrations.

Outside of sheer coincidences in typology and traits, Japanese has marked similarities with other NE Asian isolates, like Ainu and Korean--namely, word order (S-O-V), lexical morphology, and phonology. And, like these N.E. Asian isolates, it has been related for the purpose of hypothetical discussion with another broad grouping, namely the Altaic super-family, especially the Tungusic branch of E. Siberia but also the central Asian ones falling under the label 'Mongolian'. This is because just about all the languages being discussed here are typologically speaking, synthetic and agglutinative. However, in terms of its phonology, syllable structure, and morphology, and lexicon, Japanese has also been usefully compared to the super-group of Malayo-Polynesian languages.

Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition

Linguistics existing to support language teaching (LT) and learning (LL) is often referred to as 'Applied Linguistics' (AL). AL is often linked to sub-field called 'Second Language Acquisition'(SLA), even though SLA doesn't contain the sort of content with which linguistics is identified (that is, linguistic description and explanation). The relationship of AL and SLA to LT and LL is attenuated by AL's and SLA's theoretical and conceptual abstraction while its research agenda is often separated from LT by different professional agendas (since applied linguists are based at universities). Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of the research results of academic AL and SLA are not generalizable to larger sets of learners (such as, all EFL students worldwide, or EFL students in E. Asia, or EFL students in Japan, etc.).

However, one common-sense notion that is shared across AL, LT and LL is centered on the relationships of the first/native language (L1) with the second or foreign language (L2, especially when the second or foreign language is not acquired from very early childhood. The idea is simple: If a given L1 (e.g., Japanese) is not historically or genetically related to a given L2 (e.g., English), the acquisition or learning of that language will be more cognitively difficult and take longer.

This idea of language difference in terms of issues in acquisition has been academicized somewhat in AL. AL has at least two ways of realizing the idea in its discourse of theory and research. These are often referred to as 'Contrastive Analysis' (CA) and 'Error Analysis' (EA).

Let us look at Contrastive Analysis first. For CA, the L1's and L2's language systems (e.g., phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax) are compared and contrasted in detail, and the differences are used to PREDICT issues in learning the L2. For example, in phonology, Japanese is said to have no distinction between an /l/ and an /r/. So CA would predict that Japanese learners of English would have a hard time distinguishing English /l/ and /r/, both in terms of perception of speech and in production. On the other hand, Japanese /r/, at least for an English speaker, actually sounds phonetically similar to English /l/, /r/ and /d/. So /r/ sounds could also be an issue for English speakers learning JFL, marking an accent but actually interfering with intelligibility of their Japanese. Imagine such issues multiplying across differences in terms of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The implications are complex, to say the least.

Perhaps the issues that arise with CA predicting errors that don't occur while not predicting errors that do is the fault of linguistics and language description. If the language descriptions and concepts you are using to carry out a contrastive analysis are inadequate and faulty, then the errors you predict might be nonsense. They might not reflect any language reality, including the developmental language of learners (often referred to as 'inter-language' in AL. Also, languages are supposed to share some traits almost universally while other traits mark a language as unique. So these marked traits could be difficult for any beginning learner, no matter what the linguistic background. For example, English is an Indo-European language that, perhaps due to significant language contact with other languages, has lost much of its inflectional system. This has huge implications for how tense, mood and aspect are actually achieved when one communicates in English. Therefore, regardless of the language background of the EFL or ESL learner, one can predict that the 'grammar' of the English 'verb' will be a source of a lot of confusion and learners' errors.

And then there is Error Analysis. EA came about because some people noticed that CA predicted errors that didn't occur among L2 learners, but at the same time, L2 learners seemed to experience and produce errors that CA didn't predict. So EA looks in detail at the actual L2 performance of learners and attempts to produce a systematic analysis of their L2 errors and learning difficulties.

Which is not to say that EA is a perfect corrective or supplement to the inadequacies of CA. First, a distinction should be made between random MISTAKES that do not reflect the actual state of the L2 learner's language competence and the ERRORS that do indicate some sort of persistent issue. Second, EA is supposed to generalize to a large group (such as the entire population of Japanese learning English at the beginning level). So the hope would be to detect errors that characterize most if not all of that population. But EA is largely behaviorist in its assumptions, so error behaviors could be linguistically or psychologically misinterpreted by the researcher or classroom teacher using such an approach.

Implications for learning a foreign language

Still, there is a commonly accepted feeling or intuition that, if two languages are not related (such as, they have a different word order or are pronounced very differently), it takes longer to learn the L2. This is not to say that Japanese is so unique in relation to English that Japanese learners of English should have more difficulty than any other language group of learners whose native language is not related to English. There is nothing in the conceptual apparatus of AL or ELT that would support this.

However, since Japanese and English are not closely related at all, this lack of linguistic affinity is something to consider in terms of planning for language teaching and language learning at schools. Unfortunately, it is not addressed adequately. Part of this is the damaging effect that results from Japan drawing on English-speaking countries for the theories, concepts and practices that embody the dominant ideology, technology and infrastructure of LT and LL.

Re-stating the issue

Which brings us back to reason #2 for why English learning fails in Japan. Because of the differences in language typology, the beginning stages of LL will take longer and involve more cross-linguistic and learning issues. These cross-linguistic and cross-discourse issues could range anywhere from phonetics and phonology through vocabulary and syntax and overlap with how to structure a a paragraph, essay, or research report. If we think of learning a FL as a classic 'bootstrap' dilemma, perhaps the core issue here will become clearer. It takes a lot of patience, hard work, repetition, review, and attention to the details of the FL in order for a learner to get beyond the helpless beginner stage. Once beyond this helpless beginner stage, the learner enters a new phase: they will have learned enough of the L2 to succeed at learning it further, perhaps up to mastery, if they are patient enough.

The problem with English in Japan is most Japanese never get beyond the helpless beginning bootstrap phase. They don't learn enough English to learn how to learn it. Unfortunately, if they depend on their schools, universities or the commercial ELT industry to help them, most will not make much progress. For one thing, this is because much of the ELT industry, institutions and programs have failed to acknowledge how and why English is difficult to learn if your native language is Japanese (or, in the case of more and more foreign students, Chinese). They have also failed to appreciate just how difficult it is to teach such a large population of beginning learners. To conclude, this should give you more than a hint of the reasons that will follow (e.g., ELT industry, government policies, institutional management of foreign language education, teacher training, etc. ).

Reason 3: Japanese is not written with an alphabet

Japanese is not written with an alphabet.

The writing system used to represent Japanese in continuous text is notorious for its complexity. Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese) have been adopted and adapted to write Japanese. But one problem with Chinese characters is that they don't fit nicely onto Japanese. Chinese is a group of languages characterized, in part, as being 'mono-syllabic'. That is, one content morpheme of one spoken syllable in length is usually written in text with one character. However, Japanese is, unlike Chinese, highly inflected and multi-syllabic. Using Chinese characters to represent Japanese leads to syllabic and lexical opacity--one character might stand for one, two, three or more spoken syllables.

To make matters worse in terms of the complexity of written Japanese, Chinese characters are typically used to stand for different words or morphemes that may (or may not) cover some of the same semantic areas. For example, the same character might be used to represent two words or morphemes that are synonymous, even though their pronunciations are totally different. This explanation only hints at some of the complexities in adapting such a mismatched writing system to Japanese.

As written Japanese evolved, the Chinese writing system was modified and enhanced to make it more useful for full-blown Japanese texts. In order to help solve the opacity issue, two syllabaries have been put to use to complement the use of Chinese characters. These are called hiragana and katakana.

As these sets of written syllables are used today in written Japanese, hiragana (a cursive set of syllables) is used to write much of the multi-syllabic inflections and particles of the language. It is also often preferred over the use of the kanji for many high-frequency, everyday words and phrases. Clearly, the idea of using a word-level graph (such as a kanji) to write a language comes to Japan from China. But the use of syllabic graphs might come from India through the diffusion of literacy practices associated with Buddhism.

The other syllabary, katakana, captures in written form the same simplified, idealized syllables abstracted from spoken Japanese and captured in hiragana, but it is written with elements derived from kanji and displays the same sort of angularity. Katakana is typically used to write foreign loan words, especially non-Chinese ones. It is also used to represent the elements of Japanese vocabulary that imitate aural, other physical, and mental phenomena (what is called roughly 'onomatopoeia' in English, though it is much more extensive and developed in Japanese). It can also be employed to show emphasis, analogous to the way all caps or italics might be used in English.

Full-blown written Japanese will typically show mostly kanji and hiragana, with a smattering of katakana (unless the text was about foreign loan words, or was a menu at a western restaurant). A text of Japanese might also have quite a number of items in the roman alphabet (called romaji in Japanese) and Arabic numerals (though Chinese numerals are also often used). But roman letters are rarely used to romanize Japanese, except in the case of synonyms like 'UN' or 'NATO' (which do have their own Japanese pronunciations in the spoken language). Romanization does happen in advertising and on shop signs. You are most likely to see words written in the roman alphabet in academic discussions where an English or other foreign word or phrase is placed in the text and then explained in Japanese.

Since most Japanese--the sort of language that would be spoken informally but also formally--is rarely put into alphabetic form (romanization). Most native speakers of Japanese are literate in their own language, which is largely not alphabetically written. They lack much familiarity or fluency with the writing and spelling conventions of English.

For example, most university students will struggle with a dictionary laid out in traditional alphabetical order (A to Z) because Japanese language dictionaries are typically put into a syllabic order. And one hindrance to personal computer use in Japan has been learner reluctance to interface with a computer using an alpha-numeric keyboard that looks totally alien in terms of the salient features of Japanese literacy. In other words, units of written Japanese refer to words and syllables, not sub-syllabic elements, like letter-to-sound correspondences.

Even though the JIS computer keyboard in use all over in Japan does incorporate aspects of Japanese literacy, it is still most quickly used for input in computing by those who can touch type using alphabetic units (which are then converted bottom-upwards to syllables and then, when necessary by convention, to Chinese characters). The majority of Japanese can not touch type and find the idea of alphabetically analytic input of language to be alien to their feel and grasp of their own written language in situations that require interaction with a computer or word processor program.

Japanese English learners, especially visually oriented ones, might feel that written English is simply too exotic and strange for them to process visually or analyze into meaningful language. English speakers often have the same reaction to written Japanese. Written English's complex spelling conventions are largely outside the writing practices of Japanese literacy, and, to the extent that those spelling conventions actually reflect a phonetic, phonological or morphological reality, they largely do not reflect anything similar to be found in Japanese.

Complicating this are some of the the linguistic peculiarities of English. In the previous installment, I asserted that it could be argued that English is a Germanic language in terms of its pronunciation, but its spelling makes it look like a Romance language. Well, both of these aspects are foreign to Japanese learners of English. Their language's phonology is not similar to a Germanic one, and their approach to writing and spelling conventions is not a Latin or Romance one.

Connecting with e-mail and to the world wide web only really took off in Japan once G2 and G3 mobile phones became ubiquitous. Little wonder then that the Japanese quickly took to web site addresses that are read like digital bar codes instead of ponderously typed in the standard http:// form.

Also, the interface of Japanese mobile phones is set up for quick syllabic level input and conversion of the content words to kanji. Roman letters are a tertiary system, beneath and much more limited than features for handling kanji and the two syllabaries. However, the linguistic habits of many Japanese have adapted to the need for speed in text messaging. For one thing, this has led to the increased use of roman-lettered acronyms to stand for conventionally shared and frequently used phrases.

Some people have even started complaining because these acronyms are taking on pronounced forms and invading the spoken language. Parents are often shocked when they listen to their teenage sons and daughters conversing in mobile phone acronymic 'short hand' at the dinner table. Such developments are interesting for the ongoing evolution of Japanese as a vital, modern native and national language of international importance in the high tech era. However, these changes will have little or no positive impact on English learning in Japan.

Reason 4: Learning to read and write Japanese fluently takes away too much time from the rest of the curriculum

This reason is really an issue that closely relates to the previous Reason #3. Modern Japanese is an isolated language (or set of language dialects) of unknown affiliation, written with a mixed system of Chinese characters (which for the most part are logographs or morphographs) and two syllabaries--as well as Arabic numerals and a small amount of Roman alphabet (such as for acronyms, like 'NATO' or 'OECD').

Written Japanese works well for the fluent reader of the language, especially if that person is already a fluent speaker of the language (this is true for many written languages, including English). But it takes considerable amounts of time to master literacy in Japanese because, for one thing, of the cognitive and memory loads of memorizing thousands of the Chinese characters. It takes even longer to be able to manipulate the characters to produce written Japanese, even though computers, word processors, and now high-tech mobile phones have lessened this burden.

Mastering a level of literacy in standard Japanese is one of the main reasons given for students here getting such a late start at English as a foreign language (EFL). EFL learning does not really begin in earnest for most students until the first year of junior high or middle school.

Now educators, government officials, parents and social commentators fret that today's students have much lower levels with the standard national language and literacy of it. This might be true, though so far actual documentation of the perceived decline is dubious.

Instead what might be happening is that high standards and expectations are being applied to unprecedented numbers of students because so many senior students proceed on to university or college as a matter of course. Academic literacy as conceived by elite academics, educators and bureaucrats has failed to catch up with the social reality of the 'massification' of the university system.

Still, if standards for the national language and literacy in it are perceived as falling or failing, Japan has still yet another reason to be wary in committing to improving foreign language education for all students.

Reason 5: Lack of national consensus on foreign language education

This reason, once it is grasped, leads the analysis to many specific problems that are embedded in education in Japan. If you ask many Japanese, they will complain quite strongly about English language teaching and learning in the country's schools, from the junior highs/middle schools (where EFL first becomes a part of the official curriculum) right on up to its colleges and universities. So you might think that there is some sort of consensus for change. But it is not enough to agree that something is wrong with English Language Teaching (ELT) and classroom learning in Japan. There has to be some sort of consensus about what to do about the inadequacy of ELT and learning in order to improve it.

Instead of a consensus, what you will find in actual advocacy and practice breaks down along contradictory lines. Some advocate the education of more translators and interpreters. Some think that the current generations of Japanese who finish secondary and tertiary levels of education (and this is now the majority of young people now) ought to be able to read and even write within their specialties and professions. This thought is similar to the policy that drove EFL learning in Japan between the first and second wars. And to this day you will see the legacy of that period's 'Reading Method' (often misleadingly called 'Grammar Translation') in current EFL classes from the middle school level upwards. Still yet another voice of reform says that Japanese need practical English, and they often cite oral English or 'English conversation' being the best example of what they advocate.

All these priorities bring with them problems. First, you can not train most people to be translators and interpreters, so the education system here needs to be better at selecting talented students for these specialties. Also, if the nation's needs are for people to translate or interpret Japanese into English, more native speakers of English also have to be involved. Second, it can be excessively difficult and boring to be forced to read a FL you can't speak. In effect, it turns English into dead Latin, and most students simply flounder in Japanese translations and related 'grammar explanations' of the English texts rather than read in English. Third, most Japanese don't experience a pressing need for oral English skills, except when they travel overseas or if they work in a business or a branch of government that conducts its international activities at a level beyond translation and interpretation services.

Many in Japan have identified the same problem--an education system that fails at foreign languages. Now they have to take stock of why specifically their system fails and then forge some sort of working consensus for each level and type of education.

At the university level this might be centered on working language policies across the curriculum addressing FL learning's place in the wider general education curriculum. Reform could also be concentrated on better integration of FLT and FLL with majors and specialties for which foreign languages are a key skill.

As for general education, so much of EFL in Japan now falls in this area. There are actually very few programs for majoring in EFL or even majors that require it as integral to a given specialty. Instead, EFL is in effect an ill-fitting part of general education. If institutions do not take foreign language teaching and learning within general education seriously, should they be surprised that the students do not?

Reason 6: The situation at universities, aspect 1, the entrance exams

Basically, the reason/problem for this installment concerns the entrance exams of universities and colleges. The common explanation is that, due to negative wash back from university exams, senior high schools concentrate too much teaching and learning on getting ready for such exams. This deadens English at the upper secondary level. Also, the senior highs are locked into a similar situation because their entrance requirements adversely affect junior high English teaching and learning (especially year three, the final year of junior high or middle school in Japan).

The Japan HEO Blog agrees that entrance exams are a major issue, but some of the following analysis may not agree with the sort of 'causal explanations' you will hear at JALT conferences.

The university system in Japan is notorious for its entrance exams, and it is popularly thought that such exams exercise a negative 'wash back' effect on language teaching and learning at the senior highs. However, such explanations are flawed in their simplicity.

English of a sorts is indeed a prominent part of the national 'center exam' that most university applicants take and is also typically a major part of the second set of exams many students face. (These are the exams that universities, faculties and departments create and administer after the center exam.) I have also heard some at universities say that, unlike most of the other subjects on entrance exams, English always gives a "nice spread of scores" (meaning that there is something more like a predictable 'bell curve' in the ways scores are distributed). This can be a reassurance of some reliability if you have to make high stakes decisions on whom to accept and whom to reject

The arguments against the entrance exams usually develop into more elaborate explanatory theories with implied solutions, such as the following: Because the content of the exams tends to be literary, not practical, and includes a lot of translation problems, the wash back effect at the high schools means that they will not teach practical or communicative English. However, high schools are going to teach a lot of exam English--that is, preparation for exams--regardless of other considerations (such as whether or not students want to learn 'communicative' English). Do you think, for example, that if a university started using the TOEIC or TOEFL or Eiken/STEP for entrance qualification, high school teaching would be invigorated towards 'practical' and 'communicative' English? Would teaching specifically for exams like these actually create more practical and communicative English at the high schools?

Consider the example of the national center exam. It changed recently and now includes listening questions similar to the ones you might find on TOEIC, TOEFL and Eiken /STEP. This mostly resulted in senior high English classes increasing their listening components. It did not transform the English at the senior highs into a new realm of practical, communicative English.

Another problem with the theory of the wash back is it is wrongly one-way. As it turns out, high schools have a wash back on the universities. That is because most universities and colleges (except an elite group of the top 50 or so) are now desperate to get high school graduates to apply and enroll. Even if the top universities are not desperate in this numbers game, they are also in a new type of competition. That is, they are more eager than ever to identify and select the more capable and already-educated students from the high school populations. In other words, students ready to go quickly onto more specialized study and then graduate school.

So most non-elite universities and colleges really can not set too many difficult hurdles in way of admissions' qualifications. Moreover, university entrance exams are often authored specifically keeping in mind the sort of high school populations they have traditionally drawn on to get their quota of admissions each year. The institutional exams are really more a major way for the universities to earn income from the applicants. Not only do universities want to match their admissions quotas; their fiscal administrators tell their admissions offices they need to keep their number of total applicants well above the number they actually admit. The tests are written as part of the way to make money off all the applicants. Some have argued that such considerations actually go beyond the need to test any abilities, proficiencies or achievements of their applicants.

What would happen if, for example, most of the students applying to a particular department took a university's entrance exam and failed to get a qualifying score in English? Would the department fail to get a sufficient intake of students? No, it would simply lower the required score until the necessary number got admitted. In effect, it would waive the English requirement.

While it might seem strange for anyone to argue for a strong wash back effect from the high schools on the universities and colleges, that really is not the point. The point is, rather, if it ever existed, there is no longer any strong, negative, one-way wash back effect coming from the universities raining down on the the high schools.

If anything, the universities and high schools have disconnected and re-connected in a weaker but mutual 'wash back circuit' . That is because the university system in Japan has become for most institutions and most high school graduates a mass, near-open admissions system. If university entrance exams have negative wash back, it is mostly in terms of the nature of the students a given institution, faculty or department attracts. It is more and more a 'buyer's market' in university admissions for those high school graduates who have the money and time to attend higher education for 4 or more years. And once again we are considering a two-way wash back effect because universities manipulate the content and level of difficulty of their exams to reflect what they think are the abilities of the students they are most likely to get first as applicants and then as enrollments.

Overall, the entrance exams guarantee a level of basic literacy in Japanese and some numeracy for most of the students going onto higher education. And that is about it. The transition from a fairly selective small system to a mass system has probably had more to do with the quality of English education at the highest level than university exams. Which will help keep this discussion going into the next installment.

Reason 7: The situation at universities, aspect 2, elite academics, non-elite students, mismatch of expectations, poor results, with no accountability for those results

The situation at the universities will actually have to comprise its own 'series within a series' and will result in more than one actual reason as to why English learning fails in Japan. This is the seventh installment of the series, but the second to focus on the situation at the universities.

The previous installment concluded with this statement: "The transition from a fairly selective small system to a mass system has probably had more to do with the quality of English education at the highest level than university exams." This will serve as the start of the current installment.

The higher education system of Japan is now a mass, near-open admissions system. This could be a good thing. Imagine millions of students enrolling in universities and colleges every year and freely choosing to study English as a foreign language (EFL) because they want to study it. However, as many who have taught EFL at a university, college or junior college here quickly come to observe, higher education can be a very difficult place to teach EFL.

So why is that? The author of the Japan HEO Blog has taught EFL in Japan for 20 years, 17 of which have been at the level of higher education (though not exclusively). There are a considerable number of related reasons why universities and colleges fail at EFL.

The first reason for the failure of universities and colleges at EFL is the mismatch of faculty with the student populations--which then creates mismatch with the learning requirements and needs of those students. The higher education system is mass and with near-open admission standards for many if not most institutions, departments and programs of study. Yet the university system continues to train and hire academics as if a very selective, elite system were the prevailing reality. So the university system expanded greatly in the 80s and 90s, the very same system, through its graduate programs, continued to create a core of academics to teach and do scholarship and research. Little wonder then that the faculties hire and promote academics with elite backgrounds that leaves them distant from the student populations in their charge.

The mismatch is somewhat similar to my experiences in the US. Take for example, the small state college where I got my bachelor's degree in 1979-83. Many of my professors were from well-to-do families who paid for them to go to elite universities, including a lot of Ivy League degrees. This was especially true of professors in the humanities and social sciences. Most had absolutely no clue whatsoever what it was like to grow up in area like rural south central Pennsylvania or to have to attend a particular institution for FINANCIAL reasons. Part of their elite arrogance was to assume that students were at a small state college because they had not achieved academically well enough to get into a higher-rated institution.

The situation in Japan is quite analogous. Many if not most of the people who are professors at the universities have had a much more privileged background than their students. This mismatch leads to a large breakdown in teaching and learning at the universities. First, many of the professors are hapless at teaching basic general education courses, including EFL. Their scholarly and research activities have been more likely limited to a very narrow academic specialty. Second, their teaching methods assume that most students should be like they were--attending a universities for academic knowledge and even a career in higher education.

Third, in the case of English, the breakdown happens in at least two areas, much to the detriment of EFL at the universities and colleges. Most of the professors assigned to teach English do not have any interest whatsoever in teaching EFL as a part of general education at their institutions. Their educational backgrounds and current 'research' activities more likely fall under labels like 'linguistics', 'English-language literature', and 'English education' (this last term refers to typically small departments that oversee English teacher training for secondary school education). Therefore, general education EFL, while extensive in terms of what is listed in the course catalog, is an embarrassment in the actual classroom. It flounders for lack of proper teaching, teacher development, program structure and evaluation. However, it also fails miserably as a specialized area of study. In fact, there are very few EFL programs at Japanese universities, and what programs do exist, you should remember, enroll only a small number of students. These programs and departments do not primarily exist to provide EFL to the rest of the institution. More than EFL undergraduate courses of study, you are far more likely to see programs in literature, linguistics, education, and cross-cultural studies.

The effects of this situation play out in problems, issues, and deficiencies that might exceed my ability to describe them. So I will instead try to generalize to a useful level of explanation. Students at universities will most likely take EFL classes as required General Education. These are large classes with an unmanageable mix of students. Students with low ability and low motivation, students with low ability and higher motivation, even the occasional students (typically ones who have spent time overseas) with high ability and, well, confused motivation. Students might also take EFL classes as options within an array of interdisciplinary classes. They have to take a certain number of credits to fulfill graduation requirements, but they have choices of what they can take. However, optional EFL classes are often designated 'enshuu', a term that I have difficulty translating. It is supposed to mean a course that is not run as a lecture course, but then it becomes hard to give a definitive answer as to what the other possibilities are.

In contrast to traditional lectures, an 'enshuu' is supposed to be more participatory and involve activities. This might sound like it has potential for a communicative EFL class, but its status as 'enshuu' can undercut students' perception of it as a legitimate university course. If you as a teacher of an 'enshuu' combine its already low academic status with language learning activities that students are not familiar with or which they see as 'non-academic', students may react by treating the 'enshuu' as a sort of play time. 'Enshuu' typically earn fewer credits than lectures and seminars. Also, when you teach an 'enshuu', the issue of placement will rear its ugly head. You might try to run a course called 'Advanced English Writing', and students who can not earn a valid TOEIC score because their proficiency is so low will register and attend.

How does all this relate to the 'reason' given at the start of this piece? My theory is that general education and optional 'interdisciplinary' studies are, in part, a mess at the universities because of the demographic (lower academic standards) and economic (greater affluence, or at least an expectation of it) shifts from a selective, elite system to a mass, open one. The universities and their departments, and the elite academics that dominate them, often have absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what role general education and interdisciplinary studies should play in the education of their non-elite students. As it turns out, neither do their students! The academics seem to expect students to emerge from senior high school ready to be trained in narrow academic specialties (the elite assumption being that there is an underlying level of educational achievement before admission to higher education). The students themselves simply want clear guidelines and training to enable them to pass, graduate and get a job.

Reason 8: A lack of EFL programs

It is often said that Japan has not committed sufficient 'resources'--money, personnel--to improve English teaching and learning. However, I would argue that in terms of public and private spending, Japan actually spends more money than most other EFL countries, both in total and per capita. The problem is more the 'scatter shot' approach.

In terms of public policy and expenditure (but note, this includes, for example, language education at the numerous private, non-profit senior high schools and universities), much of the issue could be called a 'socio-linguistic pipe dream', and that pipe dream is the often-expressed goal of making Japan a country where most of the population will have functional fluency and literacy in EFL. Because of the pursuit of this pipe dream, so much in terms of personnel and money is wasted on students at the secondary and tertiary levels who have never shown much aptitude or desire to learn English. That might appeal to the modern sense of 'fair' and 'democratic' (two terms you will often hear in education here in Japan) but it dooms EFL teaching and learning here to delivering a vague, goal-less general education requirement, with the result being, predictably enough, ineffectiveness and wastefulness.

What Japan needs to do instead is systematically to identify language learners with the aptitude, motivation and long-term patience to master foreign languages. And then the educational system needs to implement nationwide programs that train EFL majors, minors and concentrations.

At the university and college level, this has to start with faculties, programs and departments identifying and specifying the foreign language needs and goals of their enrolled students. This information then has to be compiled to form language policies across the curriculum that all stakeholders at the universities and colleges sign on to as practical agreements leading to real changes to the curriculum and graduation requirements. For example, students in a public administration program might take so many credits of EFL in order to get a nationally recognized 'concentration' in it and would achieve a minimum TOEIC or EIKEN/STEP (a criterion-referenced EFL exam here in Japan) score as part of their graduation requirements.

Reason 9: The foreign language teaching and learning 'culture'

What is meant here by the term 'culture' is the overall approach to teaching and learning EFL (and these are collaborative activities) that is specific to Japan. Aspects of this issue might really reflect EFL situations in developed E. Asia (such as S. Korea, Taiwan, and eastern urban China) and even worldwide, but I hope to get at the heart of what is particular to the situation here in Japan.

It is often said and written that TEFL here in Japan is dominated by 'Grammar Translation'. However, usually the term grammar translation means teaching and learning a FL with compilations of grammar and then activities centered on translation of texts, often authentic and literary ones.

If you have taught at a JHS or SHS here in Japan (for example, as a JET Programme ALT), you might have noticed that students themselves do not actually do much translation (rarely above the level of an isolated sentence) and that the texts used are always 'graded', that is, reduced and re-written with control of vocabulary. Classroom discourse is in Japanese and dominated by the teacher, who presents specific rules of grammar and vocabulary terms. The communicative focus and flow, such as it is, is to get the unknown, opaque English code (L2) into the known, understood human language (standard Japanese). English texts are used mostly to illustrate the previously taught grammar rules and vocabulary.

I would argue that the overall approach goes back to the popularity of the so-called 'Reading Method' between the first and second world wars in the 20th century. The idea behind the method was appealing and simple: since it was impractical to teach oral methods in most EFL situations, why not promote a high level of EFL reading instead? The Japanese term is 'yaku-doku', which does not translate as 'grammar translation' but rather 'translation reading' instead.

So this reading method persists, and no doubt it has proved practical as a way to deliver general education English to the entire school population. However, it hasn't really led to a differentiated, sophisticated or flexible culture of teaching and learning EFL. Instead, it has resulted in a minimal level of familiarity with EFL and language learning in classrooms (and in EFL countries, this the classroom is the key 'interface', since there is no English-speaking society outside the classroom). This 'minimal level' of doing things traps both the learners and the teachers who have to oversee such a system.

Reason 10: The language teaching 'profession' in Japan

At all levels, EFL teachers face a situation where English is treated as just another school and test subject, and yet the effective teaching and learning of a foreign language require something well beyond the standard treatment as a school subject. So it is hard to write this reason without seeming to be harsh on the teachers. However, much of this situation hardly seems to be attributable to the teachers, but rather programs, schools, school boards, universities and the national government.

For teachers at most levels, there is a lack of serious and useful teacher training and professional development. In higher education, there is also the issue of who is designated to teach EFL courses. Most have backgrounds in fields that are supposed to be related to and support TEFL (e.g., literature, linguistics, and teacher training), but the reality is that such academic backgrounds prove limited for serious language teaching or the development of future language teachers.

It also means, at least at the level of higher education, academics are not rewarded for their language teaching but instead for their scholarly achievements in their original specialties (literature, linguistics, and teacher training). Moreover, this creates a double problem at the universities and colleges: university and college personnel are not really serious about creating effective EFL programs and courses for the general student population, but even the training of EFL teachers slights EFL at the expense of concentrating on education, applied linguistics, and theoretical ELT (largely imported from the US, UK and other Anglophone countries). This issue then proliferates because such inadequate teacher training programs send out young teachers to teach in the junior and senior highs.

Meanwhile, at such 'professional' organizations as JALT here in Japan, scholarship and 'research' about EFL learning and teaching abound, but a closer look at much of this discourse reveals the true state of the 'profession'. On the one hand much of it lacks any real depth of understanding of EFL and EFL in Japan and reflects instead imported teaching techniques and materials which are mostly superficial adaptations of ideas that come from Anglophone countries' ESL or British ELT for Europe.

Conclusion

The list has been compiled and manipulated somewhat arbitrarily to make it a 'ten point' one. The actual list contains more than ten reasons. More could be included. Those that have been concluded can rightfully be taken to task and argued against. The Japan Higher Education Outlook Blog, however, will make it its next task to post more information and ideas that might help improve the lot of EFL and FL teachers and learners in Japan. Hence the start of a new series of articles under the category of 'TEFL Forum'.


Labels: educational reform, EFL, ELT, failure in outcomes, TEFL