English Language Teaching in Japanese Schools

As their schools reopen this year after the summer vacation, about 7,000,000 Japanese children from 12 to 18 years old are spending five hours a week studying English. They are taught by some 85,000 teachers, few of whom have ever heard the language spoken by a native—except, perhaps, over the radio. In the universities hundreds of thousands more are busy with their seventh, eighth, ninth, or tenth year of English. In large cities tens of thousands of clerks and secretaries, waitresses and salesgirls, bankers and government employees of all ages go several evenings a week to commercial schools to learn English conversation and business correspondence. Many of these are among several hundred thousand listeners to radio English courses. At newsstands and bookstores, on streetcars and buses, electric trains and subways, thousands more are poring over magazines with English articles, movie scenarios and jokes; over grammar books whose chapter headings, such as “Elliptical Negation” and “Concessive Clause,” suggest their contents; over cram books, word lists and sample examinations. For high schools follow the lead of universities in making English grammar and translation a part of the rigorous ordeal called shiken jigoku, or “examination hell,” a stiffly competitive process of admission. And ever more business firms are requiring job applicants to take English tests.