In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks. Japan recognizes the problem, but doesn't know what to do about it. Basically, English education has yet to succeed. [1][2]
This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it.
As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that can program, so teachers from other subjects will be filling in picking up the material from textbooks as they go along.
From what I've witnessed from my school years, I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them. It happens whenever there is an English native speaker in a Japanese English class (guilty as charged), and it will happen whenever there is a real programmer in one of these "programming" classes -- at least for the foreseeable future.
>From what I've witnessed from my school years, I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them.
As somebody who had programming classes (first Pascal and then Java) throughout all my highschool being taught by a Math teacher who never really programmed other than the basics and the textbook stuff... I can tell you that I'm still glad we had the chance. Since day one I already knew more than the material and arguably than our teacher (before Highschool I'd been dabbling with PHP and C programming for web-related stuff as a hobby and as I kept going I was also doing extra stuff on the side while going to school so I never stopped being ahead).
I spent most of my programming classes in Highschool helping my friends and my teacher with stuff they didn't understand, correcting her (my teacher) whenever she got something wrong, no mocking. This kind of experience really made me become a better programmer and mentor for my peers, helped them improve and really enjoy the material (being taught by an enthusiastic peer has a much more positive effect than being taught by a borderline incompetent adult).
Most likely this experience is an outlier case, however I wanted to point out that by simply introducing programming classes is a great starting point towards fostering a more positive environment for the skilled student to thrive and for the less-skilled students to at least pick up something.
When you are a "TA" - which you basically were, according to your description - then of course you learn a lot. I've been a TA myself, and that alone gives one a very big boost because you spend a lot of time researching and solving problems - and it's fun because you are motivated like hell.
However, that says nothing - nothing at all - about the experience of everybody else in the course.
Keep in mind I really wasn't a TA. I was a normal student learning the material with the rest of the class and taking exams, doing projects and getting scolded by the teacher as was everyone else. Most of my extra "teaching" was from study groups with my peers and people simply asking me for help during lab sessions because I would simply finish my task in the first 10-20 minutes of class and then I'd either have fun online on flash games, work on my personal projects or simply laze around for the rest of the class (usually 2 hours lab classes) so.. might as well help if people need me. That's a big difference, a "TA" or authority figure usually is more intimidating and less relateable for young students, where an actual peer is more likely to keep them interested and have them learn.
Agreed. I had a very similar experience with an AP Computer Science course in high school. Considering the material and range of students, I think my teacher did a fantastic job, though. I didn't feel like I picked up that much, but the exposure of being an enthusiastic peer who could help others -- that was very worthwhile.
Similar experience, except I did some mocking (just a little bit!); the course (Pascal, mostly) was not great, but I'd say it was useful, and students did learn something.
My not-so-visionary private European school taught us Logo (a Lisp dialect) during kindergarden and primary years. I vividly recall playing with recursion when I was 9.
I don't know when you taught here, so hard to say but a couple of things have changed in the last 10 years or so. First, they have introduced a "foreign language" class for elementary school children. I know some people who have taught it and they have a lot of praise for the program. It focusses on simply interacting with foreigners and includes many different languages. Personally, I've noticed a big difference in my rural town in Japan. Small children now often walk up to me and try to use their English. They always seem thrilled when their phrases work ("Hello. My name is Tarou. What is your name?", "I am fine. How are you?", etc)
Also the instruction of both junior high school and high school English has changed. It is now (officially, anyway) taught using only English in the classroom. I left the year before it entered high school, so I never officially participated, but I got some of the students who went through the junior high program. Even in my very low level school, the fluency improved dramatically.
Finally, they began demoting teachers with poor language skill a few years ago. It's actually a bit unfortunate because some good teachers got demoted whereas poor teachers with good language skill got promoted. I suppose you can't have everything.
Anyway, they are improving over time. The one thing I should point out is that teaching language fluency is actually very difficult. Things like grammar translation is still considered the best technique in many universities. Even though Pimsleur demonstrated the effectiveness of spaced repetition in the 60's, virtually nobody builds lessons that way. If you look at the ideas of Stephen Krashen and techniques like TPRS, even though they are very effective for fluency, only the lunatic fringe utilize them.
I actually gave a demonstration of TPRS (and related skills like circling) to the Shizuoka board of education once. They seemed very excited and even said, "This is the way English should be taught", so I have some hope that they are looking in the right direction. But again, nobody gets this right. Even the most effective techniques are still quite barbaric IMHO. It's one of the reasons I'm sad to be out of language education. Lot's of important discoveries to be made ;-)
English skills of people in their early twenties still suck. There are programs in Japanese universities where foreigners teach locals English. Some of these teachers are from Australia, but for most of them English is not their first language either.
Keep in mind that your average 10 year old native English speaker also sucks at English. Sit them down in front of the TV and have them explain what was said on the news. Generally, they can't do it because their English is actually not good enough to understand.
Learners of a second language are often at a disadvantage because they expect adult level proficiency in a short period of time. They often forgo focussing on fluency in order to chase that proficiency. In the end they fail at both.
Some of the most unfortunate myths that persist about language learning really hurt. For example, if you ask the average person how many words of vocabulary they need to be "fluent", they often pick numbers like 2000. But that's the level of vocabulary for a 2 or 3 year old. Adult level proficiency requires upwards of 20,000 word families.
Basically, what I'm trying to get at is that English skills of people in their early twenties are guaranteed to suck unless they are using English almost as much as their native language. It takes native people 10-20 years to get a good level of proficiency. What we can hope to do is to refocus education on fluency rather than proficiency so that at least people can converse freely in a small area. Then over time they will gradually accumulate proficiency in other areas.
This opinion is unfortunately not widely shared in the teaching profession at large :-(
I think you are right. But I was comparing their English skills to other second language speakers of the same age, who are so much better than them, that the universities realized this and are now (rightfully) trying to benefit of the fact.
I have some notes somewhere around here as I was half way through writing a text book before I went back into programming. Give me a shout at my username @ gmail.com.
As an English teacher I'm seeing a lot of change in the new generation of teachers.
I teach high school student part time (so I can work on my side project), and the teachers over the age of 40ish have pretty terrible English(these are English teachers), but all of the newer ones have pretty good levels.
I have even been notified a few teachers are going to the US for a few weeks to get immersed in English as a sort of brush up.
The biggest issue I see so far is the lack of checking of foreign teachers, I work with a few whose work sheets for the students are riddled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar.
The assistant language teacher programme has to be blamed in part for these teachers. For those who don't know, Japan imports lots and lots of young people to be assistant language teachers for 1-5 years. They provide them with very little training and the quality varies wildly. Some are excellent teachers and essentially run classes. Others are "human tape recorders" and just provide pronunciation models for pupils.
After this programme was found to be not having much of a positive effective, the government decided to double the number of teachers they ship in from other countries.
I think they could improve English education in a number of ways: Either train up the teachers from abroad more thoroughly and give them a chance to stay much longer or send all Japanese people who teach English to study abroad for a extended period.
I think you are spot on with that. The amount of training I received was very very minimal. My current company gave us one day training - most of that time was doing paperwork for the company. While I'm experienced(just over 4 years now), there were quite a few first time teachers.
As an ALT I have seen some pretty badly run English programs in the school(eg I turn up, and they have no idea what class they want me to assist with, or leaving me for hours without work to-do - I generally try and make worksheets, lesson plans or extra material for the students to read around the subject matter, but that very rare gets used at some places.
I have even been at a school where all the English teachers were on holiday, no one really spoke English in the school and had no classes for 4 hours. It can get a little depressing.
But other English programs are amazing, one of my current schools I have written at least 40 pages of material to assist the students/extra study(voluntary), and they have informed the students, who contacted me directly for copies of that work. (I wish I was at this schoolfull time!).
> The biggest issue I see so far is the lack of checking of foreign teachers, I work with a few whose work sheets for the students are riddled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar.
Since we're on the subject of bad grammar, this sentence is a comma splice. You should replace the comma after "teachers" with a semicolon or a period.
"In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks."
Spoken fluency sucks. Reading and writing English is much better.
When I lived in Japan, and eventually achieved some basic fluency in speaking Japanese, communicating with my coworkers often consisted of English vocabulary, in sentences using Japanese pronunciation and grammar.
The reason for this is simple. They had plenty of access to English written material, and needed to read and understand it in order to do their job (computer science research).
But they had very little interaction with native English speakers on a day to day basis, so few opportunities to practice real time conversation. Which is the only way I know to actually become fluent speaking a second language.
The lack of people to talk to is definitely the number one reason their English proficiency plunges after school/college, however in my rather limited experience their reading isn't great. Like you say they have decent vocabularies, but they really try to avoid actually reading English text.
I was working with some researchers for a couple of months and I was fascinated how they have their own world of scientific publications. You could be a totally competent scientists or engineer and not know a lick of English.
They'd really only go to English publications as a last resort, and people I'd guess weren't under a ton of pressure to publish in English either.
Since then I've actually noticed this is a trend in larger countries. There is some kind of critical mass of people which once reached makes them completely capable of living in a linguistic bubble. Mostly this is simply a question of how variety of media you have available to consume. Once it's high enough and you have the major western stuff dubbed, you can kinda cost with your local language. Compare something like Poland (where surprisingly few people speak English) and some place like Estonia (where everyone speaks English)
That may change for English. The problem is that learning a language, particularly when the accent is very different, requires a lot of practice with a good model. When you have a limited number of teachers, with a level not ideal, it's a practical problem. And it's costly. Add to this a culture where people prefer to avoid English if they don't feel confident in their ability, and you have a tough problem to crack.
But technology to the rescue! There's a huge Japanese company called Benesse, doing educational products. They have an English program, one of my kids use it. It's cheap, about $15 per month. The reason is that it's mostly automated: the kid uses an app on a tablet or PC, and his accent in repeating sentences is assessed by the app. All this gamified of course. Then every two weeks he has some time with a human teacher using skype. Looks like the teacher is based in a lower wage country than Japan, which explains the low cost --- which is important to make the system accessible to as many as possible.
We'll see the results over the long haul (it's started recently), but I'm already impressed by my kid's accent on the few sentences he knows. And I'm also impressed at how they built such a system.
We'll see the effect it will have, but it's an interesting attempt at improving things.
> In Japan, English is already mandatory, yet, English fluency sucks.
I can related. French is similarly taught in Canadian schools in all English-speaking provinces and I don't know anyone in Ontario that went through those classes that can speak anything more than a few words.
In my otherwise quality public (catholic) schools the French class was seen as an extra recess where the teachers would always struggle to get the class to focus. The course was always dumbed-down as a result.
The only ones who have any proficiency have studied it outside of school or attended "French-immersion schools" (in Ontario).
The mandatory classes were a waste of time and tax money in my opinion.
Whether programming could succeed I'm not sure, but it shows that there has to be a strong interest from the students to really grasp it - because learning a language, and equally learning programming, requires a strong commitment.
That is totally not my experience. I have travelled widely in Asia and Japan easily had the best English fluency across a range of people I conversed with (well apart from Singapore but that doesn't count).
Compared to Korea/Taiwan, Japan was a breeze, even in HK I had trouble with shopkeeps outside of areas heavily frequented by westerners. I travelled to some pretty far flung areas of Japan, and was always able to get by with basic English, and even had some quite deep conversations with a traditional inn owner who had only had a handful of western guests in the 20+ years he had been running the place. How he kept up his fluency without anyone to talk to was a mystery to me.
You are correct that almost everybody is familiar with English, but that's not speaking it, let alone being fluent. To a degree, English already is part of the Japanese culture and language. But it's a different English. Some of it is compatible, but native speakers are the one's graciously degrading (to use a web programming term) to meet their level, and not them meeting you at a level you're accustomed to speaking.
Of course general familiarity is not a bad thing but is to be expected when they're taking classes everyday. The goal is for fluency, competency, and the capacity to be competitive at a global level. They're far from it, and that is why the system has yet to succeed.
Japan is a strange case. On one hand, if you ask an average person a simple question in English, something like "What did you do yesterday?" they won't be able to parse the question let alone produce a response. On the other hand, if you ask them to translate a bunch of tricky words from English to Japanese or Japanese to English they will happily churn through them. "Politician", "weapon", "credit", no problem.
It's all an artifact of their teaching methods and tests.
> You are correct that almost everybody is familiar with English, but that's not speaking it, let alone being fluent.
Compare with a hypothetical Japan where the program would not be put in place and all those people "merely" familiar with English were not at all. It'd be ridiculous to suppose such a plan would lead to 100% (or even 50%) of people being fluent.
> The goal is for fluency,
How many would have not been fluent were it not for the program?
> competency, and the capacity to be competitive at a global level.
Now many (and certainly much more than before) people will have both sufficient English comprehension and sufficient programming exposure to be able to read through foreign code, open issues in open source projects, and possibly even contribute back at some point, nurturing a virtuous feedback loop. Have you ever read core ruby devs? No offense meant but they're hardly "fluent" in English, yet they're able to exchange and contribute with the global community at large.
This is all about raising the bar and giving people more of a chance to stand in a global economy/ecosystem.
You underestimate how introverted and isolationist Japanese default culture still can be. Those devs aren't contributing because they feel competent or fluent. They're contributing despite not being. They have the capacity to take initiative and not be shy. This is a separate trait altogether, which isn't even being discussed let alone being made mandatory.
And ultimately, these devs speak code, which provides a common objective baseline for exchanging substance (which everyone certainly refers to if they can't decode their English). Their confidence likely stems for them objectively knowing how good their code is.
This is the case with science and mathematics, and with the bilingual students also. The best Japanese talent are all competitive at a global level. They aren't the issue. Them being rare is the issue. And though they should become assets to Japan, they quickly assimilate to the global community, at which point, the global community tends to appreciate and reward these people more. Many, if not most, end up in Silicon Valley or Hollywood or just working for a foreign company. Overachievers have a hard time in seniority based bureaucracies which most of Japan still is.
As marak830 commented here,
> I teach high school student part time (so I can work on my side project), and the
> teachers over the age of 40ish have pretty terrible English(these are English
> teachers), but all of the newer ones have pretty good levels.
That wouldn't be that big of a problem in a meritocracy. And it's going to be far worse with a modern skill like programming.
I would advise against making a prediction based on your argument. It is much easier to practice programming on one's own than it is to practice English.
This is one thing I don't understand. Why do you want them to speak fluent English?
If all your family, everyone you interact with, and all the media speak your native tongue, is speaking a fluent second language that important? How is your second language and how often do you use it?
Despite all the good researches have proven in bilingual people, the only advances, which I would consider a success, in second language educations, is that you can pick up the language much faster when you actually interact with a community that speaks this language.
Programming language, on the other hand, you can use it to create stuff, which makes it much easier to practice and improve. If the Japanese can add this curriculum without compromising their pupils's play time, it's going to be an easy success.
To be fair - most people don't care about learning things they don't need or think they'll benefit from. Should these kids learn english? Of course, it's the most important language to know for international business and will help them greatly later on as adults.
But they're kids right now, and they don't need english in their daily lives, so most of them don't care.
I guess it's because there is much more to learning languages than having lessons at school. I've had both English and German lessons at school(I'm Polish) since I was 7 all the way to the end of school at the age of 19. So I had 12 years of mandatory education in both languages. Yet my English is completely fluent, while I can't say anything in German. All media I've consumed was always in English, games, films, books, comics - while I never had any reason to use German.
That's why I think that just having language lessons is in no way enough, you also need to have a reason to use a language to actually remember anything.
It's not just Japan. When I started here in .NL with an ICT study, it was the first year the school offered it, and History teachers were 'teaching' hardware and software design and more, just by reading from the book. I spent more time teaching people that year than a few of those teachers did...
>I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them
Like what happens already with exceptional students for any subject. The fact that a number of teachers are barely ahead of their own material is nothing particularly new.
Actually in Japan, I could easily see students being mocked for correcting the teacher.
A little story from a Japanese friend who was fluent in English: He, of course, had to take elementary English in school. The teacher was teaching family members and asked "What do you call your grandfather's father?" He replied "I think it's great-grandfather" The teacher laughed at him, causing the whole class to laugh at him. "Of course not, it's grand-grandfather" the teacher replied.
Being a humble guy he assumed he was wrong, but checked it in a dictionary after class and showed the teacher. "Oh, well then you can say that as well" snapped the teacher.
I'm not suggesting this is every teacher in Japan, but from the mere fact that a child fluent in English has to take a class where they learn "This is a pen" shows you how rigid and ill-thought out the system is.
This is the thing about Japan. They can make these moves that are incredibly progressive and ambitious -- visionary even, yet, they really have no idea how to go about doing it.
As it stands, they don't have enough teachers that can program, so teachers from other subjects will be filling in picking up the material from textbooks as they go along.
From what I've witnessed from my school years, I guarantee you the smarter students will be correcting their teachers and making a mockery of them. It happens whenever there is an English native speaker in a Japanese English class (guilty as charged), and it will happen whenever there is a real programmer in one of these "programming" classes -- at least for the foreseeable future.
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[1] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/03/28/editorials/di...
[2] http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/whats-wron...