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Learning English to improve Japanese 2006.8.9
Efforts to professionalize the teaching of English, and by doing so raise the level of foreign language education and the ability of Japanese and foreign teachers to work together effectively, are continuing in Saga.

Last year Kono Elementary School in Saga city hired two professional English instructors in a program to utilize licensed and experienced foreign teachers in English education. Now the board of education in Ogi city has announced that as of September it will replace its ALTs with professional teachers hired out by a private firm.

The Ogi BOE cites cost reduction as one reason and “insuring that we have foreign teachers who are skilled at conducting English classes” as another.

Under the present JET program that supplies ALTs, no teaching education or experience is required. For this reason and others, whether or not a particular ALT is skilled at teaching or communicating effectively with the Japanese teacher are issues essentially left to chance.

It makes sense to hire English education professionals. The fact that effective foreign language education improves students’ native language ability is only one of many reasons.

Harvard professor of psychology and linguistics researcher Steven Pinker writes about the reasons why this is so in his book The Blank Slate. “Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across culture,” he writes in a discussion of Noam Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar. Learning about one language (such as a foreign language) affects ability in another (such as one’s native language) because the same “universal mental mechanisms” are being stimulated.

Many of Japan’s modern and contemporary novelists, including Akutagawa Ryunosuke (English, etc), Natsume Soseki (English), Mori Ogai (German), Ikezawa Natsuki (Greek), Furui Yoshikichi (German) and others, were fluent in foreign languages yet wrote (and in some cases are still writing) influential and groundbreaking works in their native Japanese. This fact alone should dispel any more debate over whether studying English has a negative effect on Japanese students’ native language.

For the sake of improved Japanese language ability as well as English ability, I hope schools around Saga continue in their attempts to professionalize English instruction.