Japan and the English Olympic Nightmare
This is the fourth and final piece of a series I began in 2017 about how the Tokyo Olympics were meant to catapult Japan’s English proficiency into the 21st century… but somehow didn’t. You may want to read part 1, part 2, and part 3 first.
In this last post, I’ll describe the state of English proficiency in post-Olympics Japan, discuss some of the likely causes behind this current state of affairs, and address some of the suggestions I had brought up in my previous posts.
Still going down
We begin as always with a look at EF Education First’s English Proficiency Index. As unbelievable as it is true, Japan has sunk even further below to position… 78(!), down 23 ranks from last year (55).
To really highlight the magnitude of the disaster of this trend, here’s a quick graph of how Japan has been faring in this index since it came out in 2011.
The blue line shows the actual index — higher is worse (further away from #1). The red line helps to contextualize the score by comparing it to the total number of countries that participated in the study that year, as the range can be quite big). In this case lower is worse, as in “in 2021 Japan was in the bottom 30% worldwide.”
As I have mentioned before, this is just an index and so this is a measure of English proficiency relative to other countries. It doesn’t necessarily say that Japan’s general level of English is getting lower — it might be that it’s not improving as quickly as the rest of the world. This view is corroborated by the trend in TOEIC scores. In 2013 Japan was 8th from the bottom, scoring an average 512 points, while in 2020 Japan was fifth from the bottom, even though it scored an average of 531 points — an improvement in absolute terms, but not so in relative terms. Regardless, given that the Olympics were meant to be used as a jumping board to boost English proficiency, it’s not unreasonable to say that this Olympic dream has turned into a nightmare.
Moreover, the pandemic, for all its negative impact in every other part of our lives, bought Japan another year to improve its English as the Olympics were delayed till 2021, but it didn’t seem to spur anything significant. The only saving grace may have been the lack of international spectators and tourists, so that only athletes, journalists, and a handful of other relevant people had to experience the poor level of communication. This point, by the way, should probably not to be understated. Reports from friends who volunteered at the Olympics detailed how they had to multiply themselves and, no matter what their official function was, basically act as translators.
So how did it get to this point? Why have all the efforts to “Englishnize” (to borrow from Rakuten’s CEO) Japan seem to be for naught? And, more importantly, is anyone asking these questions?
Even if you can’t, teach
A recent Line Research survey shows that both high school boys and girls thought English was the most important subject for their future. This is an indicator of the demand for English language instruction. At the same time, however, English competed with math as the subject that boys (#1) and girls (#2) disliked the most.
To me this is a clue that there is a failure in the delivery of the instruction — it is failing to meet the expectations of the students and is likely leading to the poor results we are seeing. The problem then could be either with the teachers, with the curriculum, or with both.
In part 3 of this series I wrote that “I didn’t meet a single teacher who wasn’t open to new ways of making their students more fluent, they just wanted to be told how. The demand is there, but the teachers need more guidance.” Michiko Weinmann, from Deakin University, published a paper in which she interviewed various teachers and arrived at the same conclusion: Teachers are eager to find new ways of teaching English, but they are lacking guidance and structure.
Even if you can’t, teach yourself
If that is indeed the case, it would seem that it is not a matter of teachers failing the students, but rather that the educational infrastructure is not supporting the teachers. A fantastic review of recent education reform in Japan written by Tatsuhiro Yoshida from the Hyogo University of Teacher Education (aptly titled “English Education Reform, Teacher Education, and the Tokyo Olympics: Perfect Timing?”) describes what this infrastructure looks like and reveals where its shortcomings lie. Since 2003 there have been a handful of plans and proposals to improve English proficiency from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), the one in 2013 deliberately “intended to coincide with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, in order for the full-scale development of new English education in Japan.” The main tenets of the reforms have remained the same and include:
- improvement of communicative abilities measured by language proficiency tests (e.g., TOEFL, TOEIC, and EIKEN);
- An increase in the recruitment of native speaking teachers, or Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs);
- Incorporation of training (e.g., LEEP) and workforce (e.g., non-JET ALTs) from private sectors;
- Standardization of the quality and contents in language teacher education, in particular teachers’ language proficiency.
Point 1 is more of an outcome than a method for the purposes of this discussion. Yoshida makes some excellent remarks about points 2 and 3, which basically boil down to the erroneous assumption that all ALTs have sufficient professional experience to improve the quality of English language teaching — I will cover this a bit more later. Point 4 is the issue in question here, since there seems to be recognition at the top level that language teacher education needs to improve. The reforms, however, seem to try and solve this issue in way that is misguided in two ways.
The first is that there is a big focus on increasing the language proficiency of the teachers. Per the 2018 reform, primary school English teachers should have B1 proficiency, and secondary school English teachers should have B2. A recent survey by MEXT (2017) revealed that only 1 percent of all elementary school teachers (N = 346,094) had attained CEFR B2 level language proficiency. I realize the statistic is doing a crossover of the requirements, but it can serve as a rough gauge of how far away teachers are from that goal. My concern here is that MEXT will focus too much on this number, because they are not questioning their assumption that an increase in fluency = an increase in language teaching quality. The thinking seems to be that just because you are a teacher who can speak English you are necessarily a good English teacher. Rather than equating fluency with teaching competence, there needs to be a stronger emphasis on language education in the teacher training curriculum.
The second problem is that the method for training current teachers to improve English teaching skills puts a lot of the burden of the training on the teachers themselves. A MEXT-initiated program aims to train 500 top teachers in the country, who must in turn train “core language teachers” at the municipal and prefectural level, who must in turn train homeroom teachers at the school level. Besides the risk of ending up playing a game of “telephone” where the final message is significantly different from the original one, placing the onus on teachers to train other teachers is a tough burden with misaligned incentives. The focus needs to be on reaching all teachers faster and controlling the quality of teacher training. MEXT may not be able to do this themselves given the scale, but working closely with a reliable partner from the private sector may be one way to do this.
Bridging the gap
Yoshida’s article supports my intuition from my previous post that the reforms are too top-down and there is too much disconnect between what is being prescribed in the action plans and the reality in the classroom. I previously suggested for local government to be more actively involved and I still think this is a plausible way to do this, especially if they want to get the private sector involved. At that scale there will be a greater choice of potential partners to work with. More progressive regions can start first and serve as inspiration for the rest.
Japan has focused on ALTs for some time, and trying to increase their numbers quickly runs the risk of reducing the average quality. I would actually tighten the requirements to be an ALT, for example by requiring the Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) certificate, but I would work with the private sector to make sure they provide this to the teachers before arriving in Japan. So, if I want to move to Japan and teach English I can do so via a private company that will train me in TEFL at no extra cost before being placed into a school (though I may have to be bonded to the company for a certain period of time). This was a policy that China had until recently and I think the philosophy behind it was sound.
I had also mentioned that businesses and startups might spur the demand for English. The startup world has continued to grow (privately-owned startups raised USD $5bn in 2019 compared to $2.9bn in 2017 and $600m in 2012). I continue to think that they will drive demand, but that demand in itself will not help to fix the problem, which is clearly structural. What we can expect until this problem is solved is that the rest of the world will try and fill that demand by learning Japanese. The number of examinees taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) worldwide was nearly 1.2m in 2019.
While I do think that Japan has missed the proverbial train with the Olympics and English proficiency, I think there is still hope that the trend can be reversed. There seems to be a more serious effort to understand what the bottlenecks are, as shown by some of the research I have mentioned. The main blocker seems to be the disconnect between what teachers can do and what teachers should do. In the short term, a mid-down approach might be able to help, but in the long term educational reform needs to take into consideration how to make English teachers better at teaching English, not just better English speakers.
