What is it about?
The new version of The Course of Study (national curriculum guidelines) was announced by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in March 2009. The new version includes measures to improve students’ communicative competence in English in Japanese senior high schools. One of the measures is to mandate that senior high school English teachers conduct all classes in English. This chapter reports on a qualitative case study conducted to explore and investigate preservice as well as inservice English teachers’ perceptions of the new language education policy.
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Why is it important?
MEXT’s new language education policy became the subject of heated debates in the field of English education. What is missing in the nationwide debates, however, is in-depth, constructive discussions not only on how inservice EFL teachers perceive the new language education policy, but also on how preservice EFL teachers perceive it in teacher education settings. While the voices of policy makers and academics (people who hold more power) can be heard, the voices of critical stakeholders, such as preservice and inservice EFL teachers (people who hold less power), are rarely heard.
Perspectives
Writing this chapter was a great pleasure because this book includes co-authors from different disciplines with whom I spent a lot of time discussing and researching multiculturalism. Collaborating with them broadened my perspectives to see my research agendas and made me realize the importance of a dialogue in which the critical stakeholders can engage each other when language education policies are developed and enacted.
Dr Toshinobu Nagamine
Kumamoto University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Preservice and Inservice English as a Foreign Language Teachers’ Perceptions of the New Language Education Policy Regarding the Teaching of Classes in English at Japanese Senior High Schools, January 2014, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-40360-5_6.
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