The Future of Education

With the spread of English as the de facto lingua franca, many parts of the world in the Outer and Expanding Circles (Kachru, 1985) have changed their English education toward communicatively-oriented English teaching. Similarly, Japan has seen a series of curriculum reforms since 1980s to promote the development of practical communication abilities in English. In spite of the government’s efforts, the reforms have been reported in the academic literature to have failed to yield nation-wide impact on the classroom practice (Butler & Iino, 2004; Humphries & Burns, 2015; Nishino, 2012; Taguchi, 2005; Underwood, 2012), but the change has become emminent under the most recent reform, where the university entrance examinations, one of the most influential factors in the school-level curriculum, will undergo a drastic change. This presentation reports on an on-going study of Japanese secondary school English teachers’ responses to these educational reforms and their views and practices of communicative language teaching. Drawing on interviews with two experienced and two early-career teachers, the presentation attempts to illustrate how they interpret and internalize the nation-led reforms to incorporate the change in their and their school's curriculum and practice. The discussions of the findings will highlight the complex process of the nation-wide curriculum change at an individual teacher level, and also at an institutional level.

Keywords: Language Education Policy, Curriculum Reform, Teacher Cognition, Organizational Behavior;

References:
[1] Butler, Y. G., & Iino, M. (2005). Current Japanese reforms in English language education: The 2003 "Action Plan". Language Policy, 4, 25-45.
[2] Kachru, B. B. (1985). Standards, codification, and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In: Quirk, R. and H. Widdowson, (eds.) English in the World: Teaching and Learning the language and the literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Humphries, S., & Burns, A. (2015). “In reality it’s almost impossible”: CLT-oriented curriculum change. ELT Journal, 69(3), 239-248.
[4] Nishino, T. (2012). Modeling teacher beliefs and practices in context: A multi-method approach. Modern Language Journal 96(3), 380-399.
[5] Taguchi, N. (2005). The communicative approach in Japanese secondary schools: Teachers' perceptions and practice. The Language Teacher, 29(3), 3-12.
[6] Underwood, P. R. (2012). Teacher beliefs regarding the integration of English grammar under new national curriculum reforms: a theory of planned behaviour perspective. Teaching and Teacher Education, 28, 911-925.