Changing from Within: Immigration and Japan

Although Japan’s demographic decline is well known, the slow but steady increase in the country’s immigrant population has been less acknowledged. Despite this continuing influx of foreigners the Japanese state still has no coordinated immigration policy that clearly addresses such issues as residency, employment, education, and access to social services. Rather it is at the local level that towns and villages all across the country are having to develop ad hoc responses to the growing number of foreigners resident in their communities. Hitherto most research into immigrants’ lives has focused on what are known as ‘diversity points’, large urban areas with significant numbers of non-Japanese residents. However, the majority of immigrants live in small, ethnically dispersed communities spread across the entire country. This paper presents a case study of one such location, an industrial town in northern Japan

From Language Policy to Pedagogic Practice: Elementary School English Education in Japan

Since April 2011, all public elementary schools in Japan now officially include in their proscribed curriculum for fifth and sixth grade students a Course of Study entitled 'Foreign Language Activities' (FLA). The introduction of FLA can be seen as part of the wider international move towards making English as a foreign language a compulsory subject in state provided primary education. This two-year longitudinal ethnographic study examines how classroom implementation of this new Course of Study is impacted by an expansive circle of constantly interacting variables including teacher education, teaching materials, school curriculum, use of native speaker assistant language teachers (ALT), resource allocation, and state mandated language-in-education planning. The research methodology involved a combination of ethnography and critical discourse analysis in order to examine the discursive, contextual, and sociocultural factors that influence language-in-education policy implementation in Japan and how these factors manifest themselves in elementary school classrooms. Data were collected from four public elementary schools in northern Japan from April 2011 to March 2013 using participant observation, interviews, and publically available documents. The findings of this study reveal that the introduction of elementary school English represents a continuation of previous iterations of educational policy that have positioned English as an essential linguistic resource for Japan's participation in the global economy. My findings also reveal that focusing solely on pedagogical practices in the elementary school classrooms obscures the a priori decisions concerning teacher training, ALT provision, mandated instructional time, and lack of formal assessment that critically affect the implementation of FLA. The study also makes a number of methodological contributions to undertaking classroom-based ethnographies in Japan. It addresses under theorized issues of translation in the use of primary Japanese language interview data, and also highlights the importance of 'tacit knowledge' in conducting prolonged fieldwork in a foreign location

日本地方と二言語を状況に応じ併用する立場

In Japan many families face various challenges in their attempts to bring up bilingual/multilingual children. There are identity conflicts, community language dominance, time pressure constraints in negotiating conflicting language demands, and the negative effects of institutional social processes such as state mandated language in education policy. This is particularly the case where families live in multilingual ‘resource poor’ areas where there is limited access to facilities, amenities, and support networks for bilingualism. This paper reports on the results of a survey examining how bilingual families in Japan living in ‘resource poor’ areas raise their children to be bilingual. It details both the planned strategies and actual interactional processes that families use to promote the regular use of two or more languages

Audiences, museums and the English middle class

The increasingly accepted way to analyse any media product is to consider production, text and audience processes. In a deceptively simple way, a television programme, for example, can be examined in the institutional, social and political context in which it is produced and with respect to the organizational framework that provides its immediate production environment. Second, its textual structures and strategies can be analysed using different approaches, such as structuralism or (in certain respects) content analysis. Third, the way in which the audience understands (or decodes) the text can be considered, as can the makeup of the audience, in terms of standard factors such as class, gender, age, ethnicity and so on. There are many variations on this sort of approach. This paper starts from such a premise. It suggests that in addition to the well formulated approaches to the study of the museum that focus generally on the institutional and wider social context for museums, or on specific museums and the processes that occur within them, or on the much studied strategies for display and narration of texts, the audiences for museums are also important

英語ノート指導資料の評価

At the start of the school year in April 2011, all public elementary schools in Japan will begin conducting compulsory English classes for 5th and 6th grade students. To meet concerns about the lack of suitable materials MEXT has published and distributed Eigo Note, a two level textbook, to all public elementary schools along with a detailed Teachers’ Guide. This paper analyzes the Teachers’ Guide in order to examine what sort of pedagogical approach is suggested and also reports on the results of a ‘snapshot’ survey of teachers’ attitudes to, and uses of, the guide, in the classroom

室蘭工業大学で英語教育内容重視の指導法

This paper examines the factors necessary for the successful implementation of a Content-Based Instruction (CBI) curriculum in MuroranIT. It outlines the shortcomings of current approaches in the university where CBI has erroneously been regarded as merely the English translation of an established academic course taught through Japanese. As this short essay will argue, effective CBI requires much more than this and raises the fundamental question of whether MuroranIT is currently capable of offering CBI courses. In answering this question I will divide my essay into five parts: a theoretical explanation of what CBI is (and isn’t); the importance of needs analysis; materials development; issues with assessment; and faculty support. I will conclude with some observations on current English education in the university and propose some tentative ideas on how to better implement our nascent CBI curriculum

Irish language and public broadcasting

This paper examines the history of Irish language broadcasting since the foundation of the Irish state in 1922. It outlines how the role of Irish in the broadcast media has always been determined by the wider social and political landscape, and the changing conceptions of what constitutes Irish national identity. The initial aim of complete language revitalization gradually gave way to a policy of marginalization. It was only relatively recently that Irish has been officially recognized as a minority language, and this in turn has enabled the language and its users to reconsider themselves in a more political light. This is especially noteworthy in the field of broadcasting where a number of initiatives have instilled a sense of democratic participation amongst Irish-speakers in a public sphere hitherto dominated by English.特集 海外の語学教育事

サードシネマの政治

The concept of Third Cinema was begun in Latin America in the 1960’s by two Argentine filmmakers, Felnando Solanas and Octavio Getino. According to Solanas and Getino, Third Cinema is concerned with making political films. This is in contrast to both ‘ First Cinema’ , which describes the type of films made by Hollywood with the aim of making a financial profit; and Second Cinema, which refers to so-called ‘ Art Cinema’ , where the aim is to depict the director’s vision of the world. Third Cinema is a collaborative process and its aim is to instigate political revolution. This paper explains the history of Third Cinema and examines whether the concept still has relevancy in the present.教育改善報

The Learning Environment and Student Motivation

In Japan, for the most part ,learning English takes plase in the formal setting of the classroom. Opportunities for communicative exchang with native speakers of the language are limited. Yet, despite this context-based English that would be more appropriate and relavant to the Japanese setting. This essay makes an argument for emphasizing context over communication as a necessary step towards achieving greater relevancy for English in student\u27s lives.教育改善報

日本の小学校教師に関して、どのようなコンピタンスが必要ですか。

Since April 2011 all public elementary schools in Japan now include in their prescribed curriculum for5th and 6th grade students a subject entitled ‘Foreign Language Activities’. In practice this equates to the teaching ofEnglish. According to the official course of study issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT), the chiefaim of the subject is to “help pupils actively engage in communication in a foreign language”. Such an aim assumesthat teachers possess the experience, competence, and confidence in their English language abilities to realize thisaim. This paper will draw upon the results of a two-year long longitudinal series of case studies of four Japaneseelementary schools and their implementation of the new course of study. It will detail how the curricular aspirationof foreign language communicative competence is subject to the influences of an expansive circle of constantlyinteracting variables. These include teacher education, curriculum design, resource allocation, and societalexpectations. In particular the paper will highlight how the desire for communicative competence must take accountof classroom reality