ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION and JAPAN

IN THE LIGHT OF THE JAPANESE COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATION

Some 95% of Japanese children trudge through upper secondary

education. Of these, 35% will find liberation into tertiary education. Indeed, at this level, they can breathe a sigh of relief from the juku cramming of high school: They've made it! The rest of academic life may be a breeze. Since the end of World War II, the strong soldierly hand of General McArthur, and the appearance of Japan onto the world scene, Nippongo-speaking people have steadily and now massively adopted English as the international lingua franca. Indeed, one does not go far with Japanese, and few foreigners make the effort to master a language that has three ways of writing, a structure different from Indo-European languages, and geographically restricted currency. A few years ago, calls by some radicals to adopt English as the national language of Japan made some sense from the point of view of international trade and diplomatic relations. From a cultural viewpoint, of course, it was absurd and thus died an early death.

As a result of this new awareness, most students applying for College enrolment are expected to "know" English. The College's concept of "knowing English" demands that the student have a reasonable command of reading English, a passable command of writing it, and no command of understanding of spoken English or of speaking it.

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985) remarks: "Language-learner language consists of (1) formulaic speech, and (2) utterances constructed creatively" (p.280). Moreover, "Every learner variety, no matter how elementary and inadequate it might be, constitutes a style in itself whereby the learner can meet at least some of his communicative needs" (Klein, 1986, p. 57). The result of paradigmatic learning--a form of brain-washing that is also used with parrots--is utter expressive rigidity and strict limitations which provide no place to creative construction and ignore the unique systemic information processing and creating entity that is the individual learner. Inasmuch as what the College expects is paradigmatic knowledge, secondary schools must be on the right track. In terms of internalizing a new culture-bound semiotic system--particularly pragmatics and semantics--this traditional approach fails to meet the needs of students who will have to operate in the international community. Tarone (1982), working in the Interlanguage model, postulated an addition to Chomsky's structural model, viz. there is a socially-governed variable rule to the structured grammar: Knowledge of a language is essentially to be characterized in structural or competence terms. Japane
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Approximate Word count = 1391
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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