An Innovative Approach to In-Service Teacher Training for Teaching English at Japanese Public Elementary Schools
Public elementary schools in Japan are currently tackling the enormous challenge of preparing to teach English as a formal academic subject to their pupils, an endeavor which will officially begin in 2020. Unfortunately, however, it has been reported that
- PDF / 1,441,056 Bytes
- 26 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 10 Downloads / 187 Views
oduction Public elementary schools in Japan are currently tackling the enormous challenge of preparing to teach English as a formal academic subject to their pupils, which will officially begin in the year of 2020. Unfortunately, however, it has been reported that teachers are not well prepared for this endeavor, and their anxiety regarding teaching English has been drastically increasing since the announcement of introduction of English as an academic subject into the elementary school curriculum. M. Ikeda (*) · H. Imai · O. Takeuchi Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Graduate School of Foreign Language Education and Research, Kansai University, Osaka, Japan e-mail: [email protected] H. Imai e-mail: [email protected] O. Takeuchi e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 H. Reinders et al. (eds.), Innovation in Language Teaching and Learning, New Language Learning and Teaching Environments, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12567-7_13
257
258 M. Ikeda et al.
This is because most of the teachers do not have sufficient pre-service training or in-service experience/training in teaching English. To partially help ameliorate this dire situation, in this chapter, an innovative in-service teacher training approach is developed, and its validation through the experience of the people involved is reported. Its development and validation, situated in a specific context, can surely contribute to the smooth implementation of English in public elementary schools.
Area of Innovation As a part of the newly introduced Course of Study (i.e., the national curriculum standards),1 the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (henceforth MEXT) has officially announced that English will be introduced nationwide into the elementary school curriculum, effective from April 2020. One of the reasons behind this decision was the general perception that the current English language education system operating in public primary and secondary schools failed to achieve the government’s target of making the Japanese fluent enough to communicate in English. Given the rapid globalization of the economy and the introduction of English into primary school curricula in neighboring countries such as China and Korea, MEXT was faced with the urgent need to improve the country’s English language education. In 2002, the ministry thus introduced English classes in elementary school not as a formal subject, but as an optional or experimental subject. In 2011, amid fierce opposition2 from several prominent 1The
Courses of Study stipulates broad standards for all schools in Japan, from kindergarten through upper secondary schools, to organize their programs with the purpose of ensuring a fixed standard of education throughout the country. It was first implemented in 1951 and has generally been revised once every 10 years. The last time it was revised was March 2008 for elementary school (starting in 2011) and lower secondary school (starting in 2012), and March 2009 (starting in 2013) for the upper sec
Data Loading...
