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Even though English is a mandatory subject in Japan, most students end up High School without even a basic level of English. Some facts about this is the measure done by TOEIC that ranked Japan 40 out of 48 countries, and on the TOEFL they score as one of the worst countries in Asia. Teaching English to Japanese native speakers may be a challenging experience with a great difficulty. This can be explained by several factors which I will discuss in this short essay. First of all, the grammar, syntax and pronunciation has significant differences with languages that come from latin, such as English, Spanish or French. The order of Japanese phrases and even words, the absence of plurals and articles may create an issue to English learning in an effective way. Another issue, is the daily life use of English, which end up not being useful as a learning aid for various factors, one of those factors is the mispronunciation of most English words to fit the Japanese language, such as “Note” is pronounced something like “Notu”, which lead to people not getting right neither the pronunciation nor the spell of words. In Japanese phonology, most sounds ends in either a vowel or an “N”, so they’re not used to end words with the English consonant sounds. Japan is one of the countries around the world strictest and severe within their students. Since young age they have to become very disciplined and obedient. The way this affects us as English teachers, is that the current method of teaching English in this country is focusing on learn grammar points and vocabulary, not on understanding the language, they don’t know what benefits they can have outside a classroom or after they pass their tests. Most schools (if not all of them) focus on the University entrance exam, which only evaluate grammar and writing, it never aims to students learn on communication skills such as listening or talking. They may have a large vocabulary, but they don’t know how or when to use it, but this fault remains in the system. It’s very well known among English teachers around the world that the Asian population tend to not be willing to speak in front of their class or other people, not just because they’re afraid of getting it wrong, since shyness is a very common issue in Japan, but also because they don’t want to cause a disruption to anyone around them, so this end up with Japanese trying to silence themselves. This can become a real problem on an English classroom, since we need to listen to our students answering our questions, doing group activities and just speaking their mind in English, but most students are reluctant to participate in those group activities, like a theater performance, a debate, or even to play games. Last but not least, Japan is an island, doesn’t have a large number of immigrants (which means not enough input to learn from native speakers or even listen to them) and not a minor percentage of Japanese population is old and don’t feel like traveling or moving out of Japan, so they think there’s no need to use any other language than Japanese. People don’t understand the benefits they can get from learning English. And since I mentioned before, Japan is a rather old population, which means parents and grandparents tend to persuade their kids into thinking the same way, which can become a real problem.
