Here's an educational reform I approve of:

The TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) will be required both to enter public universities and to graduate from them if the policy recommendations adopted Monday by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's education reform panel are formalized.

In terms of evaluating real-world communication, the TOEFL makes for a much better yardstick than the esoteric nonsense that worms its way into the entrance exams required by Japan's universities. A connection to the real world is sadly lacking when it comes to English instruction in Japan.

It's a curious paradox in a country so infatuated with American and British culture and the English language. But the sad fact is that in 2011, Japanese students taking the TOEFL ranked third from the bottom out of 33 Asian countries and came in dead last on the speaking section.

Of course, to have any effect, such reforms would have to permeate the entire educational establishment. I'd bet on that happening never than anytime in the foreseeable future. In any case, the rest of the article is worth perusing if only for this politically incorrect nugget:

The proposals, including introduction of the TOEFL, are also designed to correct the "excessive egalitarianism" at schools and to nurture the abilities of top-level students, Endo said. "Japanese education has sought for equality in (student academic achievements). Because of this, it has failed to offer education that capitalizes on (their individual) characteristics," Endo told reporters.

It's nice to see that somewhere in the world there is an educational apparatchik not beholding to the cant of "equal outcomes." Japan never stopped believing in the bell curve, it's just that they've always explained it as the sole product of strenuous effort.

Keep on scrolling down to the bottom for this juicy tidbit:

Japan spends 3.6 percent of its gross domestic product on public education, while the United States spends 5.3 percent.

Ever notice how advocates for government managed healthcare like to cite lower spending/better results when comparing other countries to the U.S., but not when it comes to public education spending?

(Though I doubt the numbers for Japan take into account the huge fees parents have to cough up for "free" public education in Japan, true of healthcare spending too.)

The successful implementation these reforms aside, they'll give a much-needed boost to Japan's ESL industry, floundering since the economy went off the rails in the 1990s, precipitating the catastrophic bankruptcy of industry-leader Nova (along with the school I worked at in Osaka).

Hmm, maybe if Social Security goes bust, I'll retire to Japan and pretend to teach English to students pretending to learn (let's be honest: that's what most English instruction in Japan boils down to).

Plus, a rekindled interest in Eikaiwa (English conversation) could give all those Mormon missionaries in Japan something productive to do with their time. It was certainly the most productive thing I did with mine.

Labels: education, english, japan

A new genre of academic essay has emerged of late, in which college professors grumble that their students "don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay." Complains Kim Brooks:

For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

The genre strikes me as a way of criticizing the teacher's unions without coming right out and saying so, because then people might assume you're in league with Scott Walker or Chris Christie or other fiends from the bowels of hell.

Though in this case, I wouldn't blame the unions. The problem begins in the universities and their "schools of education," where professors, believing that their students are blank slates, convince their students in turn that teenagers are blank slates, empty vessels into which they can pour "culture."

Even if they could, it ends up being all the same culture. All the same liberal arts education monoculture. The most important question Brooks asks is: "[Is] it really so essential that [high school] students read Faulkner?"

As for the students who did make it to more accelerated English courses, their recollections are a little less disheartening, but only a little. They read Shakespeare, they tell me, usually Romeo and Juliet, sometimes Macbeth. They read Catcher in the Rye or Huck Finn, The Sound and the Fury, a little Melville or Hardy. They read these works and then they talked about them in class discussions or small groups, and then they composed an essay on the subject, received a grade, and moved on to the next masterpiece.

The whole problem is encapsulated right there. I got good at composing those essays, and yet can't remember a book "taught" in high school English that I cared about. Most I loathed. The one thing that high school English classes do very well is make students hate reading, especially writing about reading.

Could there be a more useless real-world skill for everybody that isn't a humanities student (practically the entire population)? Or even those who are? In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton offers for our consideration the prototypical hard-striving daughter of middle-class parents who

goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother--who was never very good at school--makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

As Car Talk's Tom Magliozzi (he graduated from MIT) says about high school math courses: "The purpose of learning math, which most of us will never use, is only to prepare us for further math courses, which we will use even less frequently than never."

The goal of math should be to add, subtract, multiply and divide. And balance a checkbook. Geometry would consist of identifying a radius, diameter, right angle and hypotenuse. Work in somewhere a simple primer on statistics.

"English" would consist of reading books the students would read if they weren't stuck in a high school English class. Want to learn about Shakespeare? Watch a movie. The goal of composition would be a one page, three paragraph essay.

That's it. Make everything else an elective.

Labels: education, english, pedagogy, thinking about writing

A Japanese friend asked about the meaning of a sentence in the sample test questions from a Japanese university entrance exam.

a. I had scarcely spoken to him when he was gone.

The meanings of both "scarcely" and "gone" are ambiguous. The literal meaning of the latter is b, which could imply c or d.

b. I had scarcely spoken to him when he was no longer there.
c. I had just started speaking to him when he died.
d. I had rarely spoken to him when he died.

However, "was gone" can also mean "left." Here's an example from Frankenstein (published in 1818):

e. He was scarcely gone, when I hastened to my room to write to you.
f. Soon after he left, I hastened to my room to write to you.

This meaning implies g, though most people would say h:

g. I had scarcely spoken to him when he left.
h. I had just started speaking to him when he had to leave.

That was when my brain blue-screened. What sadist would put such a sentence in a test of English as a second language? Of course, questions like this have nothing to do with testing English competency, and everything to do the ability of the student to rote memorize huge chunks of information and regurgitate them on demand.

Consequently, the more obscure the material the better.

It's crap like this that gives me an dim view of test-heavy educational "improvement" efforts like NCLB. As bad as it is, the fuzzy-wuzzy approach is better. It produces enough performance randomness to compromise the efficacy the cram school approach. Feel-good, right-brain thinking and political correctness turns out to be good for something.

In Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, China) where getting into the college of your choice is based solely on entrance exam scores, students spend more and more time cramming for tests that elite universities make more and more difficult in order to maintain their standard deviation rank on the distribution curve, resulting in mind-boggling overkill.

It also means that these universities don't really have to be good at anything. They just have to be highly selective. It's a chicken and egg dilemma no elite institution can escape. I mean, if Harvard really was such a great educational institution, it could randomly matriculate students regardless of test scores and turn them all into geniuses. Right?

I'm reminded of the Darwinian dance of death between the poisonous dart frog and the liophis snake. Over time, the frog has become more and more toxic and the snake more resistant to the toxins, to the point that a small frog could kill an adult human. Yet the snakes still eat the frogs, even though the physiological effect is the same as going on a weekend bender.

Which pretty much describes the brain of a Japanese high school student who's made it into an top-tier university. They need to spend four years consuming unhealthy amounts of alcohol just to wash it out of their systems.

Labels: education, english, japan, language

If you double-click on a word in a New York Times article, a dictionary definition of that word will pop up (though not on the front page and not in the political diaries or blogs). Color me impressed. There's no way to select and double-click on compound nouns, but it's still a cool language study feature.

Labels: english, language

Fifteen years ago I worked at an Eikaiwa school in Osaka. It was a lot smaller than NOVA, but it had the same business plan, wasn't run very ethically, and went bankrupt at the end of the 1990s. More recently, ethical problems forced English-teaching giant NOVA into bankruptcy. Holding corporation G.Communications picked up NOVA's assets and merged them with the recently-acquired EC English schools. Neither school has a good reputation among English teachers. Only time will tell if the new owner will do more than apply a fresh coat of paint.

Student can nevertheless make good use of even shadily-run Eikaiwa schools. (NOVA got into trouble for not refunding legitimately-canceled contracts, so read the fine print.) In fact, I would recommend that serious students find the school that offers the cheapest access to a native speaker. Even Eikaiwa "teachers" who haven't studied teaching or grammar know what correctly-spoken English sounds like. Students motivated to study on their own can utilize these schools simply in order to use the teachers as sounding boards.

Labels: english, japan, language

After much legal and financial writhing about, NOVA, Japan's largest chain of private English conversation schools, finally filed for bankruptcy today. The news brings back memories of the year I spent teaching English in Osaka at a smaller but similarly ethically-challenged school.

Many of the teachers hadn't graduated from college. A few didn't even speak English as their first language (but looked Caucasian). They lied on their resumes and the school looked the other way, or issued fraudulent visas, or let them work on tourist visas. The school went bankrupt at the end of the 1990s. Good riddance.

The problem is, Japanese students get set up for bad English teaching in private schools thanks to all the bad English teaching going on in the public schools.

The panel above is from the manga Azumanga Daiou! Tanizaki Sensei, the high school English teacher, has been upstaged by a student who spent summer vacation with his family in America. "America!" she exclaims. "Jeez, even I haven't been there! We're studying English 'cause it's on the test, dammit!"

The mean, little fact about Japanese education is that despite years of study and strain, the typical hard-working Japanese student doesn't learn English. If you really want to learn English, especially speak English, so the conventional wisdom goes, you must attend an "English school" and be taught by a "native speaker."

Unfortunately, the equally mean, little irony is, students at these English schools don't learn English, either. Observes Mark McBennett, editor of English Language Teaching News, "[V]ery few students who attend the [five biggest English schools in Japan] have a realistic idea of what it takes to actually master a language."

As a result, says linguist Steven Sternfeld, "There is a strong tendency among [students] learning a second language to choose the more difficult and often counterproductive path of language learning." And in Japan, there is a strong tendency for students to pay through the nose for bogus curricula taught by uncredentialed "teachers."

To be fair, many--probably most--Japanese attend English schools with few intentions of learning English. I have no argument with students who attend English schools for the same reasons they might join a country club, except that they have picked an expensive way to entertain themselves.

But for those who wish to acquire communicative competence in the English language, I hope they would take a hard look at the misconceptions about language learning they have acquired, and that are being foisted on them. If nothing else, they should be aware of what they are paying for and at least should be getting their money's worth.

(The Daily Yomiuri is tracking the rest of the NOVA story here.)

Labels: english, japan

Rebutting the assertion that the "comparatively small schools" in Japan should be favored by English teaching professions, this Japan Times article points that that while "small schools are more convivial places in which to work,"

Teachers who worked in small schools often spoke of feeling under more pressure there than in big schools. If a tiny cog in a huge machine breaks down it's unlikely the whole thing will come to a shuddering halt. That's not the case when the teacher is the machine.

Another common sentiment was the difficulty in leaving work behind in a small school. Teachers spoke of receiving e-mails and telephone calls from their bosses at unsociable hours and on days off. This rarely happens at large schools unless you are in a management position.

Obviously, a Goldilocks solution is called for: a school that is not too big, not too small. Just right.

Labels: english, japan, language

Explaining why foreign sumo wrestlers quickly acquire communicative competence in Japanese while foreign baseball players don't, Satoshi Miyazaki, professor of Linguistics at Waseda University, pinpoints the critical factor in his book (「外国人力士はなぜ日本語がうまいのか」):

Foreign rikishi [wrestlers] are not here to learn Japanese, but to learn sumo. But by learning sumo they have to learn Japanese. That's their motivation. Many students who learn in classroom studies don't know what to do with the language they learn.

Baseball players, on the other hand, come to Japan pretty much as temporary workers, with hopes of returning to the major leagues in the U.S. And though originally an "American" game, you don't need to speak a word of Japanese to hit a home run or catch a pop fly.

The foreign sumo wrestler, Miyazaki notes, has "no prior Japanese study experience before coming to Japan"; is placed in a "total immersion" environment, and "has to learn Japanese to survive." Consequently, he has a "strong motivation to learn" and will use whatever resources are available. As a result of these language acquisition strategies, sumo wrestlers "don't need a teacher or a dictionary. They just learn through osmosis."

This sounds like hocus-pocus, but it jives with my experiences as a missionary a quarter century ago. Before arriving in Japan, I went through a two-month intensive course in Japanese (having never studied it before). My teachers were earnest, but not very well trained, and the curriculum was based on the antiquated audio-lingual method. That was the end of my formal Japanese instruction for two years.

(Actually, I did look up words in the dictionary—all the time—but as the real world wasn't slowing down while I did so, toting around a dictionary did little for my real-time comprehension.)

I floundered the first six months or so, making little headway. Then out of the blue, my language skills jumped several orders of magnitude. Language acquisition does not proceed on a smooth, linear curve, but progresses in a sawtooth fashion (the classic example being the mastery of the past tense by children), which can't be easily scheduled and plotted in a classroom.

Now, full-bore immersion has its problems. A day of intensive instruction every month would have gone a long way toward preventing bad language habits (after two years I still didn't use the personal pronoun correctly, and didn't understand why itte-imasu didn't mean "going.") But I'm talking about a day every month, not 18 credit hours a week.

The second factor Miyazaki points to is perhaps more important, and it applies equally in non-immersion environments: language is the tool, not the objective. Well, it is the objective if you're a linguist. But unless your goal is linguistics, studying language for the sake of language will get you nowhere.

USC linguistic Stephen Krashen makes the same argument quite forcefully. Teachers and students who focus on grammar, he says, are deceiving themselves if they believe that language is learned through the study of grammar. In fact, whatever progress they make "is coming from the medium and not the message. Any subject matter that held their interest would do just as well."

When I returned to Japan to teach English, many of my fellow teachers were there on educational visas, which meant they attended about 20 hours of Japanese classes a week, or the equivalent of a full academic schedule. I couldn't get over how little headway they made, for all their work and classroom time. (About as little headway as our English students made.)

Most language instruction is completely generic and unfocused: a mile wide and an inch deep. But sumo wrestlers, Miyazaki points out, come to Japan "to enter a new profession," one that demands the ability to communicate in Japanese. Like missionaries, in the process, they first acquire the specific vocabulary required to work in that profession.

Of course, the supposed flaw is immediately apparent: outside your narrow field of expertise, you become pretty illiterate. To a certain extent, though, that's true of your first language as well. Jay Leno's "Jay-walking" bits prove that you can be "fluent" in a language, yet dumb as a stump.

It may seem counterintuitive, but such a corpus—a few inches wide and a mile deep—is ultimately far more useful to the language student. That's because the syntactical engine powering human language machine doesn't care what vocabulary it uses as long as it's got a lot of it in what Stephen Krashen terms "comprehensible input."

What Noam Chomsky identified as the Language Acquisition Device, the biological catalyst that enables the automatic acquisition of language by children in a language-rich environment, has in adults gone from a roaring jet engine to a puttering biplane. But it still works. It still flies. It just needs a lot more care and attention.

And attention is key—that focused effort that keeps you hitting the books. As Miyazaki says, the focus isn't the language, it's what you want to do with the language. Large anime and foreign film libraries are available from Netflix and with online bookstores such as Book 1 and Amazon, you can develop a specialty in any subject.

I'm a great fan of studying Japanese through manga. You can start with an elementary title and work your way through the series, concentrating on a single author(s) and genre. The story is ultimately going to matter more than the language or the grammar, and that's why you'll keep reading and studying.

Labels: english, japanese culture, language, netflix, sports, sumo